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THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 





THE SEA 
AND THE JUNGLE 


BY 


H. M. TOMLINSON 





NEW YORK 
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 
681 FIFTH AVENUE 





THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


Being the narrative of the voyage of the tramp 
steamer Capella from Swansea to Para in the 
Brazils, and thence 2000 miles along the forests 
of the Amazon and Madeira Rivers to the San 
Antonio Falls; afterwards returning to Bar- 
bados for orders, and going by way of Jamaica 
to Tampa in Florida, where she loaded for 
home. Done in the years 1909 and 1910. 


DEDICATED TO THOSE WHO 
DID NOT GO 


oy ae 5p ES POO} rs 
7a Wi yf 9 fi 
oth. . Lye v 


The author is indebted to the editors of the 
English Review, the Pall Mall Magazine, the 
Morning Leader, and the Yorkshire Observer, 
for permission to incorporate such parts of this 


narrative as appeared first in their publications. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 


Il. 
uL 
IV. 


VI. 


Vil 


PAGE 


98 
185 
246 
271 


324 


e.! 
we 


i 


A 





THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


> 


, o> a 


’ 
' 
‘ 
- 
‘ 





THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


I 


TuovuGH it is easier, and perhaps far better, not to 
begin at all, yet if a beginning is made it is there 
that most care is needed. Everything is inherent 
in the genesis. So I have to record the simple 
genesis of this affair as a winter morning after 
rain. There was more rain to come. ‘The sky was 
waterlogged and the grey ceiling, overstrained, had 
sagged and dropped to the level of the chimneys. 
If one of them had pierced it! The danger was 
imminent. 

That day was but a thin solution of night. You 
know those November mornings with a low, corpse- 
white east where the sunrise should be, as though 
the day were still-born. Looking to the dayspring, 
there is what we have waited for, there the end of 
our hope, prone and shrouded. This morning of 
mine was such a morning. The world was very 
quiet, as though it were exhausted after tears. Be- 
neath a broken gutterspout the rain (all the night 
had I listened to its monody) had discovered a nest 
of pebbles in the path of my garden in a London 
suburb. It occurs to you at once that a London 
garden, especially in winter, should have no place 


in a narrative which tells of the sea and the jungle. 
(1 


2 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


But it has much to do with it. It is part of the 
heredity of this book. It is the essence of this ad- 
venture of mine that it begari on the kind of day 
which so commonly occurs for both of us in the 
year’s assortment of days. My garden, on such a 
morning, 1s a necessary feature of the narrative, 
and much as I should like to skip it and get to sea, 
yet things must be taken in the proper’order, and 
the garden comes first. ‘There it was: the black- 
ened dahlias, the last to fall, prone in the field where 
death had got all things under his feet. My pleas- 
aunce was a dark area of soddened relics; the bat- 
talions of June were slain, and their bodies in the 
mud, ‘That was the prospect in life I had. How 
was I to know the Skipper had returned from the 
tropics? Standing in the central mud, which also 
was black, surveying that forlorn end to devoted 
human effort, what was there to tell me the Skipper 
had brought back his tramp steamer from the lands 
under the sun? I knew of nothing to look forward 
to but December, with January to follow. What 
should you and I expect after November, but the 
next month of winter? Should the cultivators of 
London backs lock for adventures, even though 
they have read old Hakluyt? What are the Amer- 
icas to us, the Amazon and the Orinoco, Barbadoes 
and Panama, and Port Royal, but tales that are 


told? We have never been nearer to them, and now’ 


know we shall never be nearer to them, than that 
hill in our neighbourhood which gives us a broad 
' prospect of the sunset. There.is as near as we can 
approach. Thither we go and ascend of an eve- 


» JON 
Pri 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 3 


ning, like Moses, except for our pipe. It is all the 
escape vouchsafed us. Did we ever know the chain 
to give? The chain has a certain length—we know 
it to a link—to that ultimate link, the possibilities 
of which we never strain. The mean range of our 
chain, the office and the polling booth. What a 
radius! Yet it cannot prevent us ascending that 
hill which looks, with uplifted and shining brow, to 
the far vague country whence comes the last of the 
light, at dayfall. 

It is necessary for you to learn that on my way to 
catch the 8.35 that morning—it is always the 8.85— 
there came to me no premonition of change. No 
portent was in the sky but the grey wrack. I saw 
the hale and dominant gentleman, as usual, who 
arrives at the station in a brougham drawn by two 
grey horses. He looked as proud and arrogant as 
ever, for his face is as a bull’s. He had the usual 
bunch of. scarlet geraniums in his coat, and the 
stationmaster assisted him into an apartment, and 
his footman handed him a rug; a routine as stable 
as the hills, this. If only the solemn footman 
would, one morning, as solemnly as ever, hur] that 
rug at his master, with the umbrella to crash after 
it! One could begin to hope then. There was the 
pale girl in black who never, between our suburb 
and the city, lifts her shy brown eyes, benedictory 
as they are at such a time, from the soiled book of 
the local public library, and whose umbrella has lost 
half its handle, a china nob. (I think I will write 
this book for her.) And there were all the others 
who catch that train, except the young fellow with 


o 


4 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


the cough. Now and then he does miss it, using for — 
the purpose, I have no doubt, that only form of 
rebellion against its accursed tyranny which we 
have yet learned, physical inability to catch it. 
Where that morning train starts from is a mystery; 
but it never fails to come for us, and it never takes 
us beyond the city, I well know. 

I have a clear memory of the newspapers as they 
were that morning. I had a sheaf of them, for it is 
my melancholy business to know what each is say- 
ing. I learned there were dark and portentous 
matters, not actually with us, but looming, each 
already rather larger than a man’s hand. If certain © 
things happened, said one half the papers, -ruin 
stared us in the face. If those thing did not hap- 
pen, said the other half, ruin stared us in the face. 
No way appeared out of it. You paid your half- 
penny and were damned either way. If you paid a 
penny you got more for your money. Boding 
gloom, full-orbed, could be had for that. There was 
your extra value for you. I looked round at my 
fellow passengers, all reading the same papers, and 
all, it could be reasonably presumed, with fore- 
knowledge of catastrophe. ‘They were indifferent, 
every one of them. I suppose we have learned, with 
some bitterness, that nothing ever happens but pri- 
vate failure and tragedy, unregarded by our fellows 
except with pity. The blare of the political mega- 
phones, and the sustained panic of the party tom- 
toms, have a message for us, we may suppose. We 
may be sure the noise means something. So does 
the butcher’s boy when the sheep want to go up a 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 5 


side turning. He makes a noise. He means some- 
thing, with his warning cries. The driving uproar 
has a purpose. But we have found out (not they 
who would break up side turnings, but the people 
in the second class carriages of the morning train) 
that now, though our first instinct is to start in a 
panic, when we hear another sudden warning shout, 
there is no need to do so. And perhaps, having 
attained to that more callous mind which allows us 
to stare dully from the carriage window though 
with that urgent din in our ears, a reasonable ex- 
planation of the increasing excitement and flushed 
anxiety of the great Statesmen and their fuglemen 
may occur to us, in a generation or two. Give us 
time! But how they wish they were out of it, they 
who need no more time, but understand. 

I put down the papers with their calls to social 
righteousness pitched in the upper register of the 
tea-tray, their bright and instructive interviews 
with flat earthers, and with the veteran who is 
topically interesting because, having served one 
master fifty years, and reared thirteen children on 
fifteen shillings a week, he has just begun to draw 
his old age pension. (There’s industry, thrift, and 
success, my little dears!) One paper had a column 
account of the youngest child actress in London, 
her toys and her philosophy, initialed by one of our 
younger brilliant journalists. All had a society di- 
vorce case, with sanitary elisions. Another con- 
tained an amusing account of a man working his 
way round the world with a barrel on his head. 
Again, the young prince, we were credibly in- 


6 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


formed in all the papers of that morning, did stop 
to look in at a toy-shop window in Regent Street 
the previous afternoon. So like a boy, you know, 
and yet he is a prince of course. The matter could 
not be doubted. The report was carefully illus- 
trated. The prince stood on his feet outside the 
toy shop, and looked in. | 

To think of the future as a modestly long series 
of such prone mornings, dawns unlit by heaven’s 
light, new days to which we should be awakened 
always by these clamant cockcrows bringing to our 
notice what the busy-ness of our fellows had ac- 
complished in nests of intelligent and fruitful china 
eggs, was enough to make one stand up in the car- 
riage, horrified, and pull the communication cord. 
So I put down the papers and turned to the land- 
scape. Had I known the Skipper was back from 
below the horizon—but I did not know. So I must 
go on to explain that that morning train did stop, 
with its unfailing regularity, and not the least hint 
of reprieve, at the place appointed in the Schedule. 
Soon I was at work, showing, I hope, the right 
eager and concentrated eye, dutifully and busily 
climbing the revolving wheel like the squirrel; ex- 
cept, unluckier than that wild thing so far as I 
know, I was clearly conscious, whatever the speed, 
the wheel remained forever in the same place. 
Looking up to sigh through the bars after a long 
spin there was the Skipper smiling at me. 

I saw an open door. I got out. It was as though 
the world had been suddenly lighted, and I could 
see a great distance. | 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE vi 


We stood in Fleet Street later, interrupting the 
tide. The noise of the traffic came to-me from 
afar, for the sailor was telling me he was sailing 
soon, and that he was taking his vessel an experi- 
mental voyage through the tropical forests of the 
Amazon. He was going to Para, and thence up 
the main stream as far as Manaos, and would then 
attempt to reach a point on the Madeira river near 
Bolivia, 800 miles above its junction with the 
greater river. It would be a noble journey. They — 
would see Obydos and Santarem, and the foliage 
would brush their rigging at times, so narrow would 
be the way, and where they anchored at night the 
jaguars would come to drink. This to me, and I 
have read Humboldt, and Bates, and Spruce, and 
Wallace. As I listened my pipe went out. 

It was when we were parting that the sailor, who 
is used to far horizons and habitually deals with 
affairs in a large way because his standards in his 
own business are the skyline and the meridian, put 
to me the most searching question I have had to 
answer since the city first caught and caged me. 
He put it casually when he was striking a match 
for a cigar, so little did he himself think of it. 

“Then why,” said he, “don’t you chuck it?” 

What, escape? I had never thought of that. It 
is the last solution which would have occurred to 
me concerning the problem of captivity. It is a 
credit to you and to me that we do not think of our 
chains so disrespectfully as to regard them as any- 
thing but necessary and indispensable, though 
sometimes, sore and irritated, we may bite at them. 


8 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


As if servitude fell to our portion like squints, par- 
ents poor in spirit, green fly, reverence for our 
social superiors, and the other consignments from 
the stars. How should we live if not in bonds? I 
have never tried. I do not remember, in all the 
even and respectable history of my family, that it 
has ever been tried. ‘The habit of obedience, like 
our family habit of noses, is bred in the bone. The 
most we have ever done is to shake our fists at 
destiny; and I have done most of that. 

“Give it up,” said the Skipper, “and come with 
Gin : 

With a sad smile I lifted my foot heavily and 
showed him what had me round the ankle. “Poo,” 
he said. “You could berth with the second mate. 
There’s room there. I could sign you on as purser. 
You come.” 

I stared athim. The fellow meant it. I laughed 
at him. | 

“What,” I asked conclusively, “shall I do about 
all this?” I waved my arm round Fleet Street, 
source of all the light I know, giver of my gift of 
income tax, limit of my perspective. How should 
I live when withdrawn from the smell of its ink, 
the urge of its machinery? 

“That,” he said. “Oh, damn that!’ 

It was his light tone which staggered me and not 
what he said. The sailor’s manner was that of one 
who would be annoyed if I treated him like a prac- 
tical man, arranging miles of petty considerations 
and exceptions before him, arguing for hours along 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 9 


rows of trifles, and hoping the harvest of difficulties 
of no consequence at the end of the argument would 
convince him. Indeed I know he is always im- 
patient for the next step in any business, and not, 
like most of us, for more careful consideration. 
“Look there,” said the sailor, pointing to Ludgate 
Circus, “see that Putney ‘bus? If it takes up two 
more passengers before it passes this spot then 
you've got to come.” 

That made the difficulty much clearer. I agreed. 
The *bus struggled off, and a man with a bag ran 
at it and boarded it. One! Then it had a clear 
run—it almost reached us—in another two seconds! 
—TI began to breathe more easily; the danger of 
liberty was almost gone. Then the sailor Jumped 
for the ’bus before it was quite level, and as he 
mounted the steps, turned, and held up two fingers 
with a grin. 

Thus was a voyage of great moment and ad- 
venture settled for me. 

When I got home that night I referred to the 
authorities for the way to begin an enterprise on 
the deep. What said Hakluyt? According to him 
it is as easy as this: “Master John Hawkins, with 
the Jesus of Lubeck, a ship of 700 tunnes, and the 
Solomon, a ship of seven score, the Tiger, a barke 
of 50, and the Swalow of 30 Tunnes, being all well 
furnished with men to the number of one hundred 
threescore and ten; as also with ordnance and 
vituall requisite for such a voyage, departed out of 
Plinmouth the 18 day of October in the yeere of our 
Lord 1564, with a prosperous wind.” 


10 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


But we all know such things were done far better 
in that century. Yet Master John Hawkins, who 
seems to have handled a fleet with greater facility 
than I do this pen now I am so anxious to scratch 
it across preliminaries and get it to sea, did not 
come to a decision by the number of passengers on a 
Putney ’bus. So I turned to a modern authority. 
Yet Bates, I found, is worse than old John Haw- 
kins, Bates actually arrives at his destination in the 
first sentence. He steps across in thirty-eight 
words from England to the Amazon. “I embarked 
at Liverpool with Mr. Wallace, in a small trading 
vessel, on the 26th day of April 1848; and, after a 
swift passage from the Irish Channel to the equator 
arrived on the 26th of May off Salinas.” 

Well, I did not. I say it is a gross deception. 
Voyaging does not get accomplished in that off- 
hand fashion. It is a mockery to captives like our- 
selves to pretend bondage is puffed away in that 
airy manner. It is not so easily persuaded to dis- 
encumber us. Indeed, with this and that, I found 
the initial step in the pursuit of the sunset red a 
heavy weight, and hardly suited to the constitution 
of men who have worked into a deep rut; but that 
high resolution and a faith equal to belief in the 
liquefaction of St. Januarius’ blood are needed to 
drop the protective routine of years, to sheer off the 
dear and warm entanglements of home and friend- 
ships; to shut the front door one bleak winter eve- 
ning when the house smells comfortable and secure, 
and the light on the hearth, under such circum- 
stances, is ironic in its bright revelation of years of 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 11 


ease and stability till then not fully appraised; and 
so depart in the dusk for an unknown Welsh coal- 
ing port, there to board a tramp steamer for a voy- 
age that has some serious doubts about it, though 
its landfall shall be near the line, and have palms in 
it. The door slammed, I noticed, in a chill and 
penetrating minor, an incident of travel I have 
never seen recorded. 

Now do I come at last, O Liberty, my loved and 
secret divinity! Your passionate pilgrim is here, 
late, though still young and eager eyed; yet with 
his coat collar up-turned for the present. Allons! 
the Open Road is before him. But how the broad 
and empty prospects of his freedom shudder with 
the dire sounds and cries of the milk churns on Pad- 
dington Station! 

And next I remember black night—it was, I 
think, about three a.m.—and a calamitous rain, and 
a Welsh railway station where I had alighted, faint 
with a famine, a kit bag soon to increase in weight 
and drag, and a pair of numbed feet. There was a 
porter who bore himself as though it were the last 
day and he knew the worst, a dying station light, 
the wind and rain, and me. Outside was the dark, 
and one of the greatest coaling ports in the world. 
As I could not see the coal in great bulk I could not 
admire it. ‘The railway man turned out the light, 
conducted me politely into a puddle, set my course 
for the docks in uncharted night with a dexter hav- 
ing no convictions, and left me. I began to hate 
the land of the wild bard in which I found myself 
for the first time, and felt a savage satisfaction in 


12 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


being nearly a pure blooded London Saxon; and as 
I surveyed my prospects in that country, not even 
the fact that I had a grandparent named Hughes 
would have prevented me striking Wales with my 
umbrella, for it is only a cheap one; but I had left 
it in the train. 

It had never occurred to me (any more than it 
did to you when you got this book to learn about 
the tropic sea and the jungle) that the Open Road, 
where the chains fall from us, would include Swan- 
sea High Street four hours before sunrise in a 
steady winter downpour. But there I discovered 
that trade wind seas by moonlight, flying fish, In- 
dians, and forests and palms, cannot be compelled. 
They come in their turn. They are mixed with 
litter and dead stuff, like prizes in a bran tub. Go- 
ing down the drear and aqueous street it was clear 
that if there are exalted moments in travel, as on 
the instant when we discover we really may prepare 
to go, yet exaltation implies the undistinguished 
flats from which, for a while, we are translated. 
This is a travel book for honest men. I am still on 
the flat. It will be to-morrow presently. 

My chief fear was that my waterproof, rattling 
in the wind, would alarm silent and sleeping Swan- 
sea. I found a policeman standing at a street cor- 
ner, holding out his cape to help away the rain. He 
could give me no hope. He knew where the dock 
was, but the way thither was difficult and tortorous. 
I had better follow the tram lines, and ask again, 
if I saw anybody. Therefore the tram lines I fol- 
lowed till my portable estate, by compound interest, 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 13 


had increased to untold tons; but the empty tram 
way went on for ever down the rows of frozen and 
desolate lamps, so that I surrendered all my 
chances of the seas of the tropics and the jungle of 
the Brazils, and turned aside from the course which 
the policeman said led to ships and the deep, en- 
tered the dark portico of a shop, where it was only 
half wet, and lit my pipe, there to wait for the shy 
gods to turn my luck. Hesitating footsteps fum- 
bled to where I was hidden, and stopped at the 
flash of my match. “Could yer ’blige with a light, 
mister?” | 

He was a little elderly seaman in yellow oilskins 
and a so’wester. He was rather drunk. His oil- 
skins gathered the reflected street shine, so that he 
looked phosphorescent, an old man risen wet and 
shining from the ocean. He was looking for Buenos 
Aires, he explained, and hadn’t got any matches. 
Now he, for the Plate, and I, for ultimate Ama- 
zonas, set off down the Swansea tram lines. And 
the wind whined through overhead wires, and a lost 
dog followed us along the empty thoroughfare 
where the only sound was of waterspouts, and the 
elderly mariner sang bold and improper songs, so 
that I wondered there was not an ‘irruption of 
nightcaps at upper Swansea windows to witness 
this disturbance of their usual peace. 

We came at length to abandoned lagoons, where 
spectral ships were moored down the marges, and 
round the wide waters was the loom of uncertain 
monsters and buildings. Railway metals waylaid 
us and caught us by the feet. There were many 


14 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


electric moons swaying in the gale, and they spilled 
showers of broken light, which melted on the black, 
water, and betrayed to us our loneliness in outer 
night. The call of a vessel’s syren across that in- 
hospitable space was heard by us as the prolonged 
moan of the lost. 

The old man of the sea took me under a stack of 
timber to light his pipe. He borrowed my box of 
matches, and malicious spurts of wind extinguished 
each match, steadily, as mine ancient struck them. 
It was now 4a.m. He threw each bit of dead wood 
down, without irritation, as though it were the fate 
of man to strike lights for the gods to douse, but 
yet was he uplifted now beyond the hurt of cosmic 
mockery. ‘The matches were not wasted. At least 
they lighted up his sorrowful face as he talked to 
me. JI would not have had him any the less drunk, 
for it but softened his facial mtegument, which I 
could see had been hardened and_ set by bitter ex- 
perience, masking the man; but now his jaded life,’ 
warmed by emotion, though much of the emotion ~ 
was artificial and of the pewter born, was quick in 
his face again, and made him a human responsive 
to his kind, instead of a sober and warped shellback 
with a sour remembrance of his hardships, and of 
the futility of his endurance, and of the distance 
away of his masters with their bowels of iron. 

He had seven children, and the sea was a weary 
place. Had I any children?—and God keep them 
if I had. He was a troublesome old man (“that’s 
another light gone’’) but he had just left his kids 
(“ah, to hell wi’ the wind”) and he had to talk to 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 1g 


someone about them, and that was my rotten luck, — 
said he. We got to the fifth child, and I heard 
something about her, when the wind reached round 
the wood stack at us, and snatched the last glim. 
So it was in the dark that I heard about the other 
two and the wife, while one of my pockets filled 
with rain. Only Milly, he said, was at work, and 
what was four pound a month for the rest? And 
he was sick of the sea and chief mates, and did I 
think a chap stood for a better time when he died, 
if he kept off drink and did his bit without grous- 
ing, like some of the parson fellers said? Then he 
indicated my ship, and disappeared in the dark. 
He is still waiting an answer to his last question, 
which I have saved for you to give him. 

For me, I was in no mood to discuss whether 
balm is to be got in Gilead, when we come to the 
place; but stumbling among the lumber on the de- 
serted deck of the s.s. “Capella,” I found a cabin, 
fell into it, and remember nothing more but the 
smell of hot bread, eggs and bacon, and coffee, 
which visited me in a beautiful dream. Then I 
woke to the reveille of a tin whistle, which the chief 
engineer was playing in my ear; and it was day- 
light. The jumble of recollections of the night be- 
fore were but dark insanities. But the smell of that 
aromatic food, I give grace, did not pass with the 
awakening, for next door I heard lively sizzling in 
the galley. Already Fleet Street was hull down. 


If you are used only to the methods of passenger 
steamers and regular routes, then you know little 


~ 


16 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


of travel. You are but carried about. Insistent 
clocks and schedules keep that way, and the up- 
holstered but rigid routine is a soporifie. You 
never see the hither side of the hedge. The granite 
countenance of fortune, her eyes filmed like frozen 
pools, which keeps alert and bright the voyager who 
is unprotected from her unscheduled and unmoral 
acts except by his own ready buckler, is watched for 
you by others. You are never surprised into fear 
by the unlucky position of the planets, nor moved 
to sing Laus Deo, when now and then, the stars are 
propitious. I had been brought hastily to the 
“Capella,” for it was said she was sailing instantly. 
This morning I learned at breakfast that nobody 
knew when she could sail. Our steamer sat two feet 
higher than her capacity. There was some gal- 
vanised iron to come from Glascow, some machin- 
ery from Sheffield; and owing to labour difficulties 
we were short of several hundred tons of coal. A 
little mob of us, all strangers, shuffled after the 
Skipper’s spry heels that morning to the Board of 
Trade offices, where an official mumbled over the 
ship’s articles, to our shut ears, and we signed where 
we were told. A more glum and unromantic group 
of voyagers, each man twirling his shabby hat in his 
hands as he waited his turn for the corroded pen, 
was never seen this side of the Elizabethan era. I 
became the purser of the “Capella,” with my wages 
lawfully recorded at a shilling per month. 

I was committed. There was no withdrawal now 
but desertion. And desertion, at times, I seriously 
considered, because for a week more the cargo 


THE SEA AND THE* JUNGLE 17 


dribbled down to us, while I endured as a moucher 
about those winter docks with their coal tips, and 
the muddy streets with their sailors’ slop marts, 
marine stores, and pawnshops having a cankered 
display of chronometers, telescopes, and other flot- 
sam of marine failure and wreckage. Daily the 
quays and the dismal waterside ways with their 
cheap shops were still more depressed by additional 
snow mush and drives of sleet; and it was no 
warmth for this idler that he saw the tradesmen, 
because of the season, putting holly among their 
oranges and wreathing beer bottles with chains of 
coloured paper. The iron decks and cabins of my 
new home were as chill and unfriendly as the empty 
grate, the marble tables, and the tin advertisements 
of chemical slops of a temperance hotel. Am I 
plain? Such are the conditions which compass the 
wayward traveller. This is what chills one’s rapid 
pulse when pursuing at last the rosy visions of boy- 
hood. ‘The deplorable littoral of our island king- 
dom is part of a life on the ocean wave, and should 
help you in coming to a decision when next you see. 
a friendless and bestial sailorman. It' becomes 
necessary to declare that we shall really get down 
to the tropics presently; have the courage to wait, 
like the crew of the “Capella.” Our ship did sail, 
when she was ready. 

It was the-afternoon before we sailed, and having 
listened long enough to my messmates, who, after 
dinner, weighed the probabilities of malaria, yellow 
fever and other alien disasters into our coming 
strange voyage, that I went into the town to take 


18 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


my last look round a book shop, and to get some 
marine soap, dungarees, and things. Here was I at 
last with my heart’s desire. On the very next day 
I should sail, I myself, and no other hero, veritably 
Me at last, for a place not on the chart, because the 
place we should find, at the journey’s end, the map 
described with those words of magic: “Forest” and 
“Unexplored.” JI made my way round crates and 
barrels on that untidy deck, which had a thick mud 
of coal dust and snow, to the ladder overside. Coal 
dust and melting snow! But where was the up- 
lifted heart, the radiant anticipation, as of one to 
whom the future was big with treasures to be born, | 
which are the privilege of a young pilgrim, released 
from his usual obligations to pursue far horizons 
in the Spanish main, while his envious fellows in the 
city still cast ledgers under gas lamps? Here was 
another swindle of the romanticists. You may 
search their warm and golden pages in vain for coal 
tips, melting ice, delays, and steam heaters that 
will not work for cold cabins. Down they go here, 
though. These gallant affairs, I thought, as I de- 
scended the wet and gritty ladder, are much better 
done before the fire at home, in your slippers; for 
the large scale map, as you traverse its alluring 
blank areas, leaves out the conditions which now, 
when I am on the actual business, precipitate as ~ 
frozen spicules, as would north winds, my warm, 
aerial, and cloudy enthusiasms that were wont to be 
. dyed such wonderful hues by sunsets, poems, and 
tales of old travel. Another of these congealing 
draughts was now to catch me unbuttoned. Because 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 19 


of our unusual destination, and the wild stories that 
were told of it, we were a point of interest in Swan- 
sea docks, and had many interviewers and curious 
visitors. Some of them were on the quay then, 
inspecting our steamer, and as I stepped off the 
ladder one turned to me. 

“Mister,” he whispered, “are you going in her?” 

“IT am,” I said. 

“O gord,” said he. 

That night I met a number of my grave fellow 
shipmates in the town. The question was, Should 
we then go back to the ship? 

“What,” burst out one of us in hippie Uhis 
gold- laced cap was already resting on his right eye- 
brow—‘Now? Not me. Boys, don’t freeze the 
Carnival. Follow me!” 

We followed him. The rest of the evening is more 
easily given in dumb show. There was a mechanical 
piano in a saloon bar, and it steadily devoured 
pennies, and returned to us automatic joy, fortis- 
simo, over which our conversation strenuously high- 
stepped: and vaulted. Later, there was a search 
for cabs, and an engineer carried with him every- 
where two geese by their necks and sometimes trod 
on their loose feet. When he did this he snatched 
a goose from his own grasp, and then roundly 
abused us for our post-dated frivolity. We learned 
our steamer was now moored in mid-dock. We 
found a quay wall, and at the bottom of it, at a 
great depth in the dark, the level of the water was - 
seen only because shreds of lamp-shine floated 
there. We understood a boat was below, and found 


20 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


it was, and we loaded it till the water brimmed at 
the gunwale. As we mounted the “Capella’s” rope- 
ladder only one goose fell back into the dock. 


The “Capella” started in her sleep, and she woke 
me. She was still trembling. Resting my hand on 
her I felt her heart begin to throb, though faintly. 
We were off. 

It was a bright morning, early and keen. Those 
habitual quays now were moving past us. The decks 
were cleared, the carpenter and some sailors were 
fixing the hatches, and the pilot, muffled in a thick 
white shawl, was on the bridge with the Skipper. 
We stopped in the outer lock, the exhaust hum- — 
ming impatiently while a pier-head jumper—for 
we were a Sailor short—was examined by our doc- 
tor. The Skipper had some short words for an 
official who had mounted the bridge, because the 
third mate had deserted, and had taken his half 
pay; and the official, who had volunteered to get us 
a substitute, had failed. There were now but two 
mates for our big tramp steamer going a long and 
arduous voyage which included the navigation for 
some months of narrow inland waterways in the 
tropics. Our first mate, passing amidships where 
the Purser was leaning overside, stopped to tell 
me what this meant for him and the second mate. 
I was mighty glad it was not the purser’s fault. I - 
have never heard a short speech more passionate; 
and his eyes were feral. Yet it became increasingly 
clear to me, as the voyage lengthened, that his eyes 
no more than met the case. 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 21 


Out we drove at last. It was December, but by 
luck we found a haleyon morning which had got 
lost in the year’s procession. It was a Sunday 
morning, and it had not been ashore. It was still 
virgin, bearing a vestal light. It had not been 
soiled yet by any suspicion of this trampled planet, 
this muddy star, which its innocent and tenuous 
rays had discovered in the region of night. I 


thought it still was regarding us as a lucky find 
there. Its light was tremulous, as if with joy and 
eagerness. I met this discovering morning as your 
ambassador while you still slept, and betrayed not, 
I hope, any greyness and bleared satiety of ours to 
its pure, frail, and lucid regard. ‘That was the last 
good service I did before leaving you quite. I was 
glad to see how well our old earth did meet such a 
light, as though it had no difficulty in looking day 
in the face. The world was miraculously renewed. 
It rose, and received the new-born of Aurora in its 
arms. ‘There was clouds of pearl above hills of 
chrysoprase. The sea ran in volatile flames. The 
shadows on the bright deck shot to and fro as we 
rolled. The breakfast bell rang not too soon. This 
was a right beginning. 

The pilot was dropped, and a course was shaped 
to pass between Lundy and Hartland. A strong 
northwester and its seas caught us beyond the 
Mumbles, and the quality of the sunshine thinned 
‘to a flickering stuff which cast only grey shadows. 
The “Capella” became quarrelsome, and began to 
strike the seas heavily. You may know the 
“Capella” when you see her. She is a modern - 


22 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


three-thousand-ton freighter, with derrick supports 
fore and aft, and a funnel; and the three of them 
are so fearful of seeming rakish that they overdo 
the effect of stern utility, and appear to lean ahead. 
She is a three-island ship, the amidships section 
carrying the second mate’s cabin, and the cabins of 
the four engineers, all of them, excepting the 
Chief’s cabin, looking outwards overseas across a 
narrow sheltered alleyway; and on a narrower 
athwartship’s alleyway there, and opening astern, 
are the Chief’s place, and the cook’s galley, the 
entrance to the engine-room, and the engineers’ 
messroom. Above this structure is the boat deck. 
You may reach the poop, which contains the mas- 
ter’s and chief mate’s quarters, the doctor’s and 
steward’s berths, and the saloon, by descending a 
perpendicular iron ladder to the long main deck, or 
else, as all did at sea, by a flying trestle bridge, 
which is dismantled when in port. Her black fun- 
nel is relieved by a cryptic design in white, and her 
bows are so bluff that, as the chief mate put it, “her 
belly begins there.” She might not take your eye, 
but a shipowner would see her points. She carries 
a large cargo on a comparatively low registered 
tonnage. The money that built her went mostly 
im hull and engines, and the Jatter do their work as 
sweetly as an eight-day clock, giving ten and a half 
knots, weather permitting, en a low coal consump- 
tion. ‘There was not much money left, therefore, 
for balm in the cabins, and that is the reason we do 
not find it there. 

At sundown the sky cleared. The wind, increased 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 23 


in violence, had swept it of the last feather. Lundy 
was over our starboard bow, a small dark blot in 
a clear yellow light which poured, with the gale and 
the rising seas, from the west. The glass was fall- 
ing. Now, the Skipper has often told me how his 
“Capella” had faced hurricanes off Cape Hatteras, 
when laden with ore, and had kept her decks dry. 
There are other stories about her surprising buoy- 
ancy, when deeply laden, and I have heard them all 
at home, and they are fine stories. But what lies 
they are! For there below me, with Lundy not 
even passed, and the Bay of Biscay to come (Para 
not to be thought of yet) were tons and tons of salt 
wash that could not get time to escape by the scup- 
pers, but plunged wearily amongst the hatches and 
winches. x 

“T’ve never seen her as dirty as this,” grumbled 
the chief engineer apologetically, peeping from his 
cabin at cold green water lopping over casually on 
to the after deck. “It’s that patent fuel—its stowed 
wrong. Now she’ll roll—you can feel it—the cat 
she is, she’s never going to stop. It’s that patent 
fuel and her new load line.” 

Certainly she sat close to the sea. I had never 
seen so much lively water so close. She wallowed, 
she plunged, she rolled, she sank heavily to its level. 
I looked out from the round window of the Chief’s 
eabin, and when she inclined those green mounds of 
the swell swinging under us and away were supe- 
rior, in apparition, to my outlook. 

“Listen to it,” said the Chief. He stopped trit- 
urating some shavings of hard tobacco between his 


99 


24. THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


huge palms, and sat quietly, hands clasped, as 
though in prayer. ‘The surge mourned over the 
deck. The day, too, was growing towards the dusky 
hours of retrospection. That sombre monody out- 
side was like the tremor and boom of the drums 
funebre. “That chap some of you talk about— 
Lloyd George!”—said the Chief, suddenly rubbing 
his tobacco again with energy. (Good God, I 
thought, and here we are at sea too. Now what 
has the misguided man done.) “If I had him here 
I’d hold him down in that wash on deck till it 
cleared. Then he’d know. He put it there, to 
break sailors’ legs. This steamer, she had dry decks 
till her load line was altered. She carries more now 
than she was built for, two hundred tons more. If 
I had him here—but there you are! Popularity! 
There’s a fine popular noise for you, isn’t it? 
Sailors growled for better food. “What about this 
improved fool scale?’ says Mr. Lloyd George to the 
shipowners. ‘Oh,’ said they, ‘we'll give ’em better 
food, the drunken insubordinate dogs, if you'll 
make overloading legal.’ “‘Why,’ says Lord George, 
‘then it wouldn’t be illegal, would it? So it was 
done. What does the public know about a ship’s 
buoyancy? Nothing. But it understands food. 
So the clever man heightens the Plimsoll mark, 
adds a million or so to shipowners’ capital by dip- 
ping his pen in the ink, and gives Jack more jam. 
What you want ashore,” the Chief added bitterly. 
“is not more voters, as some say, but more lunatic 
asylums.” 

Though I had left politics at home, to be settled 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 25 


by others, like the trouble with the drains, the dog 
licence, and the dispute about the garden fence, 
I glanced with interest at the Chief. I know him 
well. Not only is he a kindly man, but he himself 
is also a philosophic rebel. But his eye was hard, 
and he still ground the tobacco with forgetful 
energy, as though an objectionable thing were be- 
tween his strong hands. Then impatiently he 
threw the tobacco loose on his log book, which was 
open on his deck, paused, and said, “Ah, maybe 
the man thought a little freeboard the less didn’t 
matter. God give him grace,” and picked his flute 
out of a bookshelf which was fastened above his 
bunk; sat down over the steam heater, and broke 
out like a blackbird. Yet was it a well-remembered 
air he fluted so well. I listened so long as respect 
for the artist demanded, then rose, filled my pipe 
from the fragrant grains on the log book, and left 
him. Presently I would listen to such airs; but this 
was too soon. 

I repeat I had confidence in the “Capella” to 
gain. I went forward to get it, mounting the 
bridge, where my cabin mate, the youthful second 
officer, was in charge, in his oilskins. A cheerful 
sight he looked: “I think,” said he briskly, “we’re 
going to catch it.” He was puckering his face over 
our course. Lundy was looming large—even Rat 
Island was plain—but it looked so frail in that 
flood of seas, wind, and wild yellow light streaming 
together from the evening west, that I looked for 
the unsubstantial island to spring suddenly from its 
foundations, and to come down on us a stretched 


26 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


wisp of thinned and ragged smoke. ‘The sea was 
adrift from its old confines. ‘The flood was pouring 
past, and the wind was the drainage of interstellar 
space. Lundy was the last delicate fragment of 
land. It still fronted the upheaval and rush of the 
ungoverned elements, but one looked for it to be 
swept away. | 

Yet that wild and scenic west, of such pallor 
and clarity that one shrank from facing its inhos- 
pitable spaciousness, with each shape of a wave 
there, black against the light as it reared ahead, a 
distinct individual foe in the host moving to the — 
attack, was but the prelude. Night and the worst 
were to come. Just then, while the last of the light 
was shining on the officer’s oilskins, I was only 
surprised that our bulk was such a trifle after all. 
Our loaded vessel looked so bluff and massive when 
in dock. She began to attempt, off Lundy, the 
spring and jauntiness of a trawler. ‘The bows 
sank to the rails in an acre of white, and the spume 
flew past the bridge like rain. ‘The black bows 
lifted and swayed, buoyant on submarine up- 
heavals, to cut out segments of the sunset; then 
sank again into dark hollows where the foam was 
luminous. The cold and wind were bitter dolours. 

We rolled. I grasped the rail of the weather 
cloth, in the drive of wind and spume, and rode 
down on our charger like a valiant man; like a 
valiant man who is uncertain of his seat. Some- 
thing like a valiant man. We advanced to ti 
attack, masts and funnel describing great arcs, and 
steadily our bows shouldered away the foe. I think 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 27 


sailors deserve large monies. Being the less valiant 
—for the longer I watched, the more grew I wet 
and cold—it came to my mind that where we were, 
but a few weeks before, another large freighter had 
her hatches opened by the seas, and presently was 
but a trace of oil and cinders on the waters. You 
will remember I am on my first long voyage. The 
officer was quite cheerful and asked me if I knew 
Forest Gate. There were, he said, some fine girls 
at Forest Gate. 

We rounded Hartland. It was dusk, the weather 
was now directly on our starboard beam, and the 
waves were coming solidly inboard. The main deck 
was white with plunging water. We rolled still 
more. 

“T can’t make out why you left London when 
you didn’t have to,” said the grinning sailor. “I'd 
like to be on the Stratford tram, going down to 
Forest Gate.” 

This was nearly as_ bad as the Chief’s flute. I 
held up two fingers over those hatches of ours, 
called silently on blessed Saint Anthony, who loves 
sailors, and went down the ladder; for night had 
come, and the prospect from the “Capella” was not 
the less apprehensive to the mind of a landsman 
because the enemy could not be seen, except as 
flying ghosts. The noises could be heard all right. 

I shut my heavy teak door amidships, shut out 
the daunting uproar of floods, and the sensation 
that the night was collapsing round our heaving 
ship. There was a home light far away, on some 
unseen Cornish headland, rising and falling like a 


28 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


soaring but tethered star. Nor did I want the lights 
of home. 

“T love the sea,” a beautiful woman once said to 
me. (We, then, stood looking out over it from a 
height, and the sea was but the sediment of the 
still air, the blue precipitation of the sky, for it was 
that restful time, early October. I also loved it 
then.) 

I was thinking of this, when the concrete floor of 
the cabin nearly became a wall, and I fell absurd- 
wise, striking nearly every item in the cabin. Was 
this the way to greet a lover? Sitting on a sea- 
chest, and swaying to and fro because the ship com- 
pelled me to a figure of woe, I began to consider 
whether it was only the books about the sea which 
~ [I had loved hitherto, and not the sea itself. Per- 
haps it is better not to live with it, if you would 
love it. The sea is at its best at London, near mid- 
night, when you are within the arms of a capacious 
chair, before a glowing fire, selecting phases of the 
voyages you will never make. It is wiser not to try 
to realise your dreams. There are no real dreams. 
For as to the sea itself, love it you cannot. Why 
should you? I will never believe again the sea 
was ever loved by anyone whose life was married 
to it. It is the creation of Omnipotence, which is 
not of human kind and understandable, and so the 
springs of its behaviour are hidden. The sea does 
not assume its royal blue to please you. Its brute 
and dark desolation is not raised to overwhelm 
you; you disappear then because you happen to 
be there. It carries the lucky foolish to fortune, 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 29 


and drags the calculating wise to the strewn bones. 
- Yet, thought I, that night off Cornwall, if I pray 
_ now as one of the privileged and lucky foolish, this 
very occasion may prove to be set apart for the 
sole use of the calculating wise. Because that is the 
way things happen at sea. What else may we ex- 
pect from It, the nameless thing, new-born with 
each dawn, but as old as the night? Now for me 
had it degenerated into its mood of old night, be- 
having as it did in the lightless days, before poetry 
came to change it with flattery. It was again as 
inhuman as when the poet was merely a wonder- 
fully potential blob on a warm mudbank. 

Here, you see, is the whole trouble in appealing 
to Omnipotence. Picture me entering the wide 
western ocean at night, an inconspicuous but self- 
important morsel sitting on a sea-chest, at a time 
when it was perhaps ordained that hundreds of 
ships should have anxious passages. (Afterwards 
I learned very many ships did have anxious pas- 
sages.) How could I expect to be spared, even 
though somewhere the hairs of my head were all 
numbered? It is plain that to spare me would be 
to extend beneficence to all. There only remained 
to me my liberty to hope that our particular 
steamer might miss all seventh waves, by luck. I 
was free to do that. 

I turned up the dull and stinking oil lamp, and 
tried to read; but that fuliginous glim haunted the 
pages. That black-edged light too much resembled 
my own thoughts made manifest. There were some 
bunches of my cabin mate’s clothes hanging from 


30 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


hooks, and I watched their erratic behaviour in- 
stead. The water in the carafe was also interesting, 
because quite mad, standing diagonally in the 
bottle, and then reversing. A lump of soap made 
a flying leap from the washstand, and then slithered 
about the floor like something hunted and panic- 
stricken. I listened to numerous little voices. There 
was no telling their origins. There was a chorus 
in the cabin, rustlings, whispers, plaints, creaks, 
walls, and grunts; but they were foundered in the 
din when the spittoon, which was an empty meat 
tin, got its lashings loose, and began a rioting fan- 
dango on the concrete. Over the clothes chest, 
which was also our table and a cabin fixture, was a 
portrait of the mate’s sweetheart, and on its frame 
was one of my busy little friends the cockroaches; 
for the mate and I do not sleep alone in this cabin, 
not by hundreds. The cockroach stood in thought, 
waving his hands interrogatively, as one who talks 
to himself nervously. ‘The ship at that moment re- 
ceived a seventh wave, lurched, and trembled. The 
cockroach fell. I rose, listening. I felt sure a new 
clamour would begin at once, showing we had 
reached another and critical stage of the fight. But 
no; the brave heart of her was beating as before. I 
could feel its steady pulse throbbing in our table. 
We were alive and strong, though labouring dire- 
fully. 

It was when I was thinking whether bed would — 
be, as I have so often found it, the best answer 
to doubt, that I heard a boatswain’s pipe. 

I fought one side of the door, and the wind fought 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE ‘31 


the other. My hurry to open the door was great, 
but the obstinate wind jammed it firmly. Without 
warning the wind released its hold, the ship fell 
over to windward, the door flew open, and forth I 
went, clutching at the driving’ dark. Then up 
sailed my side of the ship, and the door shut with 
the sound of gunfire. I had never experienced such 
insensate violence. These were the unlawful noises 
and movements of chaos. Hanging to a rail, I was 
puzzling out which was the fore and which the 
rear of the ship, when a flying lump of salt water 
struck me in the face just as a figure (I thought it 
was the chief officer) hurried past me bawling “All 
hands.” 

The figure came back. “That you, purser? 
Number three hatch has gone,” it said, and dis- 
appeared instantly. 

So. Then this very thing had come to me, and at 
night! Our hatches were adrift. It was impossible. 
Why, we had only just left Swansea. It could not 
be true;.it was absurdly unfair. This was my first 
long voyage, and it had only just begun. I stood 
like the cricketer who is out for a duck. 

If I could tell you how I felt, I would. Some- 
body was shouting somewhere, but his words were 
cut off at once by the wind and blown away. I felt 
my way along a wet and dark iron alleyway which 
was giddily unstable, pressing hard against my 
feet, and then falling from under me. I got round 
by the engine-room entrance. Small gleams, shav- 
ings of light, were escaping from seams in the 
unseen structure, but they showed nothing, except 


22 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


a length of wet rail or a scrap of wet deck. The 
ship itself was a shade, manned by voices. 

I could not see that anything was being done. 
Were they allowing her to fill up like an open 
barge? I became aware my surcharged feelings 
were escaping by my knees, which kept knocking in 
their tremors against a lower rail. I tried to stop 
this trembling by hardening my muscles, but my 
fearful legs had their own way. Yet it is plain 
there was nothing to fear. I told my legs so. Had . 
we not but that day left Swansea? Besides, I had 
already commenced a letter which was to be posted 
at Para. The letter would have to be posted. They 
were waiting for it at home. 

Somewhere below me a heavy mass of water 
plunged monstrously, and became a faintly lumi- | 
nous cloud over all the main deck aft, actually 
framing the rectangular form of the deck in the 
night. It was unreasonable. I was not really one 
of the crew either, though on the articles. I was 
there by chance. No advantage should be taken of 
that. A torrent poured down the athwartships 
alleyway, and nearly swept me from my feet. 

One could not watch what was happening. That 
was another cruel injustice. ‘The wind and sea 
could be heard, and the ship could be felt. But 
how could I be expected to know what to do in the 
dark in such circumstances? There ought to be a 
hight. ‘This should have happened in the daytime. 
My garrulous knees struck the lower rail violently 
in their excitement. I leaned over the rail, shading 
my eyes. I grew savagely indignant with some- 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE — 33 


thing having no name and no shape. I cannot even 
now give a name to the thing that angered me, but 
can just discern, in the twilight which shrouds the 
undiscovered, a vast calm face the rock of which no 
human emotion can move, with eyes that stare but 
see nothing, and a mouth that never speaks, and ears 
from which assailing cries and questions fall as 
mournful echoes, ironic repetitions. This flung 
stone falls from it, as unavailing as your prayers; 
but we shall never cease to pray and fling stones, 
alternately, up there into the twilight. 

Nevertheless, when the chief, with his hurricane 
lamp, found me, he says I was smiling. The youth 
who was our second mate ran up and stood by us, 
the better to shout to the deck below. He shouted, 
bending over the rail, till he was screaming through 
hoarseness. He turned to us abruptly. “They 
don’t understand a word I say,” he cried in despair. 
“There isn’t a sailor or an Englishman in the crowd, 
the German farmers.” This, I found after- 
wards, was nearly true. These men had been signed 
on at a Continental port. It was really our Dutch 
cook who saved us that night. It was the cook who 
first saw the hatch covers going. 

The ship’s head had been put to the seas to keep 
the decks as clear as possible, and being now more 
accustomed to the gloom I could make out the men 
below busy at the hatch. Most conspicuous among 
them was the cook, who had taken charge there, and 
he, with three languages, bludgeoned into surpris- 
ing activity the inexperienced youngsters who 
were learning for the first time what happens to a 





34 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


ship when the carpenter’s chief job on leaving port 
has its defects discovered by exceptional weather. 
They were wading through swirling waters as they 
worked, and once a greater wave sprang bodily 
over them, and when the hatch showed through the 
foam again some of the men had gone as though | 
dissolved.. But it was found they had kept the 
right side of the bulwarks, and the elderly car- 
penter, whose leg had got wedged in a winch, was 
the only one damaged. 

If you ask me when I shall be pleased to allow 
the necessary sun to rise upon this narrative to give 
it a little warmth, then I must tell you it cannot be 
done till we have fastened down the “Capella’s” 
number two hatch, at least. That hatch has gone 
now, and if hatches one and four give way while 
number two is getting attention from the weary, 
soaked, and frozen crowd which has just had an 
hour’s desperate work at number three, then I fear 
the sun will never rise on this narrative. (How 
Bates got over to his wonderful blue butterflies in 
those forest paths under a tropical sun in thirty- 
eight words I do not know. He must have been 
thinking of nothing but his butterflies. I cannot do | 
it, with the seas and the ship keeping my mind so 
busy.) 

Luckily, the other hatches kept staunch. We 
were watertight again. When the Old Man, the 
Chief, the Doctor, and the Purser, gathered late 
that night in the Chief’s cabin to see what it was he 
had secreted in his cupboard, and boasted of, we 
sat where we could, being comfortably crowded, | 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 35 


and I never knew tobacco could taste like that. I 
felt as if never before had I found such large lei- 
sure for extracting its full flavour. From being 
suddenly confined within a space which gave me a 
short outlook of a few hours, I was presently re- 
leased into the open again and of what might re- 
main to me of the usual gift of ample years. I had 
all that time to smoke in. Never did a pipe taste 
so sweet. It is idle for good and serious souls to 
think me graceless here with this talk of tobacco 
immediately after such a release. Let me tell them 
my sacrificial smoke rose up straight and accepted. 
Looking through the smoke I saw clearly how 
worthy, kind, and lovable were the faces of my 
comrades. I warmed to this voyage for the first 
time; as though, after a test, I had been initiated. 
This was the place for me, with men like these about 
me, and such great affairs to be met. I revelled in 
the thought of our valorous bluff, insignificant as 
we were in that malign desolation, sundered from 
our kind. 

“Chief,” said the Old Man, “it was my depart- 
ment that time. None of your old engines did it.” 

“You've got a good cook,” said the Chief, “I saw 
that.” Then the Chief, remembering something, 
turned in his seat to the picture hanging above his 
desk of a smiling and handsome matron. ‘“Here’s 
luck, old girl,” he said, holding up his glass; “you 
can still send me some letters.” 


The Chief, in case of an emergency, slept in his 
clothes that night on the settee, and I climbed into 


36 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


his bunk. What a comfortable outline the man 
had, as he lay on his broad back, mildly snoring. 
There was a tangle of tense hair over a square 
copper coloured forehead. A long experience of 
such nights was written in many lines on that brow, 
and was shown in that indifferent snoring while 
chaos was without. ‘The nose sprang out of the 
big face like an ejaculation, and beneath it was a 
moustache clipped short to show the red of the 
upper lip. The jaw was powerful, but its curves 
made it friendly. His body and limbs hid the settee 
and had a margin over. I quite believed what I 
had been told of his successful way with refractory 
stokers. There was confidence to be got from a 
mere look at that slumbering Jovian form. ‘The 
storm assailed its hairy and fleshy ears in vain. 
I braced my knees against the bulkhead to keep 
myself still, the rolling was so violent, and went to 
sleep . . . waking to find us on a level keel; and 
was deceived into thinking the parallel lines of 
grey and gold in the upper air, seen as a picture 
framed by the port, were the heights about a har- 
bour into which we had run for shelter; but it was 
only cloudland over the western ocean. ‘The still- 
ness, too, was but a short reprieve. ‘The wind was 
merely making a detour, to sprig at us from an- 
other quarter. | 
The sun died at birth. The wind we had lost 
we found again as a gale from the south-east. The 
waters quickly increased again, and by noon the 
saloon was light and giddy with the racing of the 
propeller. I moved about like an infant learning 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 37 


to walk. We were 201 miles from the Mumbles, 
course S.W.14W.; it was cold, and I was still look- 
ing for the pleasures of travel. The Doctor came 
_ to introduce himself, like a good man, and tried me 
with such things as fevers, Shaw, Brazilian ento- 
mology, the evolution of sex, the medical profession 
under socialism, the sea and the poets. But my 
thoughts were in retreat, with the black dog in full 
cry. It was too cold and damp to talk even of sex. 
When my oil lamp began to throw its rays of brown 
smell, the Doctor, tired of the effort to exalt the 
sour dough which was my mind, left me. It was 
night. O, the sea and the poets! 

By next morning the gale, now from the south- 
west, like the seas, was constantly reinforced with 
squalls of hurricane violence. The Chief put a 
man at the throttle. In the early afternoon the 
waves had assumed serious proportions. ‘They 
soared by us in broad sombre ranges, with hissing 
white ridges, an inhospitable and subduing sight. 
They were a quite different tribe of waves from 
the volatile and malicious natives of the Bristol 
Channel. ‘Those channel waves had no serried 
ranks in the attack; they were but a horde of 
undisciplined savages, appearing to assault without 
design or plan, but getting at us as they could, 
depending on their numbers. The waves in the 
channel were smaller folk, but more athletic, and 
very noisy; they appeared to detach themselves 
from the sea, and to leap at us, shouting. 

These western ocean waves had a different char- 
acter. ‘They were the sea. We did not have a 


38. THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


multitude of waves in sight, but the sea floor itself 
might have been undulating. The ocean was pro- 
foundly convulsed. Our outlook was confined to 
a few heights and hollows, and the moving heights 
were swift, but unhurried and stately. Your alarm, 
as you saw a greater hill appear ahead, tower, and 
bear down, had no time to get more than just out of 
the stage of surprise and wonder when the “Ca- 
pella’s” bows were pointing skyward on a long up- 
slope of water, the broken summit of which was 
too quick for the “Capella” —the bows disappeared 
in a white explosion, a volley of spray, as hard as 
shot, raked the bridge, the foredeck filled with 
raging water, and the wave swept along our run, 
dark, severe, and immense; with so little noise too; 
with but a faint hissing of foam, as in a deliberate 
silence. ‘The “Capella” then began to run down a 
valley. 

The engines were reduced to half speed; it would 
have been dangerous to drive her at such seas. Our 
wet and slippery decks were bleak, wind-swept, and 
deserted. The mirror of water on the iron surfaces, 
constantly renewed, reflected and flashed the wild 
hghts in the sky as she rolled and pitched, and 
somehow those reflections from her polish made the 
steamer seem more desolate and forlorn. Not a 
man showed anywhere on the vessel’s length, except 
merely to hurry from one vantage to another— 
darting out of the ship’s interior, and scurrying to 
another hole and vanishing abruptly, like a rabbit. 

The gale was dumb till it met and was torn 
in our harsh opposition, shouting and moaning then ~ 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 30 


in anger and torment as we steadily pressed our 
iron into its ponderable body. You could imagine 
the flawless flood of air pouring silently express till 
it met our pillars and pinnacles, and then flying past 
rift, the thousand punctures instantly spreading 
into long shrieking lacerations. The wounds and 
mouths were so many, loud, and poignant, that you 
wondered you could not see them. Our structure 
was full of voices, but the weighty body which drove 
against our shrouds and funnel guys, and kept them 
strongly vibrating, was curiously invisible. The 
hard jets of air spurted hissing through the 
winches. ‘The sound in the shrouds and stays be- 
gan like that of something tearing, and rose to a 
high keening. The deeper notes were amidships, 
in the alleyways and round the engine-room casing; 
but there the ship itself contributed a note, a me- 
-tallic murmur so profound that it was felt as a 
tremor rather than heard. It was almost below 
human hearing. It was the hollow ship resonant, 
the steel walls, decks, and bulkheads quivering 
under the drumming of the seas, and the regular 
throws of the crank-shaft far below. 

It was on this day the. “Capella” ceased to 
be a marine engine to me. She was not the “Ca- 
pella” of the Swansea docks, the sea waggon 
squatting low in the water, with bows like a box, 
and a width of beam which made her seem a wharf 
fixture. To-day in the Atlantic her bluff bows rose 
to meet the approaching bulk of each wave with 
such steady honesty, getting up heavily to meet its 
quick wiles, it is true, but often with such success 


40 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


that we found ourselves perched at a height above 
the gloom of the hollow seas, getting more light and 
seeing more world; though sometimes the hill-top 
was missed; she was not quick enough, and broke 
the inflowing ridge with her face. She behaved so 
like a brave patient thing that now her portrait, 
which I treasure, is to me that of one who has be- 
friended me, a staunch and homely body who never 
tired in faithful well-doing. She became our little 
sanctuary, especially near dayfall, with those 
sombre mounts close round us bringing twilight 
before its time. 

Your glance caught a wave passing amidships as 
a heaped mass of polished obsidian, having minor 
hollows and ridges on its slopes, conchoidal frac- 
tures in its glass. It rose directly and acutely 
from your feet to a summit that was awesome be- 
cause the eye travelled to it over a long and broken _ 
up-slope; this hill had intervened suddenly to ob- 
scure thirty degrees of light; and the imagination 
shrank from contemplating water which over- 
shadowed your foothold with such high dark bulk 
toppling in collapse. ‘The steamer leaning that 
side, your face was quite close to the beginning of 
the bare mobile down, where it swirled past in a 
vitreous flux, tortured lines of green foam buried 
far but plain in its translucent deeps. It passed; 
and the light released from the sky streamed over 
the “Capella” again as your side of her lifted in 
the roll, the sea falling down her iron wall as far as 
the bilge. The steamer spouted violently from her 
choked valve, as it cleared the sea, like a swimmer 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 41 


who battles, and then gets his mouth free from 
a smother. | 
Her task against those head seas and the squalls 
was so hard and continuous that the murmur of 
her heart, which I fancied grew louder almost to a. 
moaning when her body sank 'to the rails, the panic 
of her cries when the screw raced, when she lost her 
hold, her noble and rhythmic labourings, the sense 
of her concentrated and unremitting power given 
by the smoke driving in violence from her swaying 
funnel, the cordage quivering in tense curves, the 
seas that burst in her face as clouds, falling roaring 
inboard then to founder half her length, she pres- 
ently to raise her heavy body slowly out of an acre 
of foam, the cascades streaming from her in veils,— 
all this was like great music. I learned why a ship 
has a name. It is for the same reason that you 
and I have names. She has happenings according 
to her own weird. She shows perversities and vir- 
tues her parents never dreamed into the plans they 
laid for her. Her heredity cannot be explained by 
the general chemics of iron and steel and the prin- 
ciples of the steam engine; but something counts in 
her of the moods of her creators, both of the happy 
men and the sullen men whose bright or dark ener- 
gies poured into her rivets and plates as they ham- 
mered, and now suffuse her body. Something of 
the “Capella” was revealed to me, “our” ship. She 
was one for pride and trust. She was slow, but that 
slowness was of her dignity and size; she had valour 
in her. She was not a light yacht. She was strong 
and hard, taking heavy punishment, and then lift- 


42 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


ing her broad face over the seas to look for the next 
- enemy. But was she slow? She seemed but slow. 
The eye judged by those assailing hills, so vast and 
whelmingly quick. The hills were so dark, swift, 
and great, moving barely inferior to the clouds 
which travelled with them, the collapsing roof 
which fell over the seas, flying with the same im- 
pulse as the waters. There was the uplifted ocean, 
and pressing down to it, sundered from it only by 
the gale—the gale forced them apart—the foun- 
dered heavens, a low ceiling which would have been 
night itself but that it was thinned in patches by 
some solvent day. And our “Capella,” heavy as 
was her body, and great and swift as were the hills, 
never failed to carry us up the long slopes, and 
over the white summits which moved down on us 
like the marked approach of catastrophe. If one 
of the greater hills but hit us, I thought . 

One did. Late that afternoon the second mate, 
who was on watch, saw such a wave bearing down 
on us. It was so dominantly above us that in- 
stinctively he put his hand in his pocket for his 
whistle. It was his first voyage in an ocean — 
steamer; he was not long out of his apprenticeship ~ 
in “sails,” and so he did not telegraph to stop the 
engines. ‘The Skipper looked up through the chart- 
room window, saw the high gloom of this wave 
over us, and jumped out for the bridge ladder to 
get at the telegraph himself. He was too late. 

We went under. The wave stopped us with the 
shock of a grounding, came solid over our fore- 
length, and broke on our structure amidships. The 





~ THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE. 43 
concussion itself scattered things about my cabin. 
When the “Capella” showed herself again the ven- 
_ tilators had gone, the windlass was damaged, and 
the iron ends of the drum on the forecastle head, on 
which a steel hawser was wound, had been doubled 
on themselves, like tinfoil. 

By day these movements of water on a grand 
scale, the harsh and deep noises of gale and break- 
ing seas, and the labouring of the steamer, no more 
than awed me. At least, my sight could escape. 
But courage went with the light. At dusk, the 
eye, which had the liberty during the hours of light 
_ to range up the inclines of the sea to distant sum- 
mits, and note that these dangers always passed, 
was imprisoned by a dreadful apparition. When 
there was more night than day in the dusk you saw 
no waves. You saw, and close at hand, only vertical 
shadows, and they swayed noiselessly without pro- 
gressing on the fading sky high over you. I could 
but think the ocean level had risen greatly, and was 
see-sawing much superior to us all round. The 
“Capella” remained then in a precarious nadir of 
the waters. Looking aft from the Chief’s cabin I 
could see of our ship only the top of our mainmast, 
because that projected out of the shadow of the 
hollow into the last of the day overhead; and often 
the sheer apparitions oscillating around us swung 
above the truck of it, and the whole length vanished. 
The sense of onward movement ceased because 
nothing could be seen passing us. At dusk the 
steamer appeared to be rocking helplessly in a nar- 
row sunken place which never had an outlet for us; 


44 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


the shadows of the seas erect over us did not move 
away, but their ridges pitched at changing angles. 

You know the Sussex chalk hills at evening, just 
at that time when, from the foot of them, they lose 
all detail but what is on the skyline, become an 
abrupt plane before you of unequal height. That 
was the view from the “Capella,” except that the 
skyline moved. And when we passed a barque 
that evening it looked as looks a solitary bush far on 
the summit of the downs. ‘The barque did not pass 
us; we saw it fade, and the height it surmounted 
fade, as shadows do when all light has gone. But 
where we saw it last a green star was adrift and was 
ranging up and down in the night. 

This was the dark time when, struggling from 
amidships to the poop, you knew there was some- 
thing organised and coherent under you, still a 
standing place in chaos, only because you could feel 
it there. And this was the time to seek your fellows 
in the saloon, where there was light, warmth, sane 
and familiar things, and dinner. The “Capella’s” 
saloon was fairly large, and the Skipper’s pride. It 
was panelled in maple and oak, with a long settee 
at the foreward end upholstered in red velvet, the 
velvet protected by a calico cover. <A brass oil 
lamp with an opaline shade hung over the table 
from a beam beneath the skylight. There was a 
closed American stove, with a rigorously polished 
brass flue running up through the deck. On two 
oak sideboards in corners of the saloon some arti- 
ficial plants blossomed; from ‘single stems each 
plant blossomed into flowers of aniline dyes and of 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 45 


different species. One of these plants, an imitation 
palm, and a better imitation of life than the others, 
_ was carefully watered throughout the voyage by the 
steward till it wilted into corruption and an offence, 
and became a count against the steward which the 
skipper never forgave, for he thought his floral 
ornaments lovely. When a pretty Brazilian lady 
visitor at Itacoatiara admired the magenta rays of 
one blossom, he culled it for her (five earnest min- 
utes with a sharp knife, for there was wire behind 
the green bark) more as a sacrifice and a hard duty 
than a joy, and often spoke of it afterwards, shak- 
ing his head regretfully. 

Ah! that saloon. I remember it first, shiny, cold, 
and repellent, with a handful of fire to its wide 
capacity for draughts, in the northern seas. It 
had curious marine odours then, with which I was 
not friendly till long after, odours that lamps, bur- 
nished brass, newly polished wood, food, and the 
steward’s storeroom behind it,. never fully ac- 
counted for; and I remember it as I found it in 
the still heat of the Amazon, when it had the air of 
an oven; when, Writing in it, the sweat ran off the 
fingers to soil the paper, strange insects crawling 
everywhere on its green baize table cover, and bang- 
ing against its lamp. I remember it assiduously 
now, every trivial feature of it, and the men, now 
scattered over all the world, thrown together in 
it then for a spell to make the most of each other. 
It has the indelible impress of a room of that house 
where first the interest in existence awakened in us. 

The Skipper, with stove behind him, took his seat 


46 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


before the soup tureen at the head of the table. You 
would as soon think of altering the chart-room 
clock, even were it wrong, as of touching the soup 
tureen without the Skipper’s orders. It is his duty 
and his right to serve the soup, and to call the 
steward to inform him the density of the vegetables 
in it is too heavy. We have no market garden on 
board, you know. 

The Doctor was on the Skipper’s right hand, and 
the Purser next to the Doctor, and on the opposite 
side, the chief mate. ‘There was the plump and 
bald-headed German steward, in white apron, the 
lid of one eye heavier than the other, serving us in 
his shirt sleeves, sometimes sucking his teeth with a 
noticeable click when he knew a dish deserved our 
approval. You kept the soup in the plate by hold- 
ing it off the table and watching its tides. When 
her stern sailed up, and the screw raced, the glass 
shade of the lamp, being a misfit, took our eyes to 
watch the coming smash; the soup then poured 
over you, and trying to push your chair back from 
the mess, you found the chair was a fixture on the 
floor. This last fact was never remembered. I 
should try to push my “Capella” chair back now, 
if I were sitting in it. | 

The Doctor, who had been long enough tinkering 
careless bodies to have grown a little worn and 
grizzled, was often removed from us by a faint but 
impervious hauteur, though maybe he was only 
a little better and differently dressed. He was 
a patient listener, but his eyes could be droll. The 
Doctor’s chuckle, escaping from his thoughts while 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 47 


he was unguarded, would sometimes make the cap- 
tain look up from a narrative with question and a 
trace of resentment in his glance. The captain 
was a great traveller, but he was puzzled to find the 
memory of our surgeon following him to the most 
remote and unfamiliar strands. “Now how did 
that fellow come to be at a place like that?’ the 
captain would whisper to me afterwards. “Can't 
make him out. Who is he?” The surgeon had a 
bottomless fund of short stories, to which he would 
sometimes go about the time when we were pushing 
away the banana skins and nutshells. He had an 
elisive and stimulating method with them. He knew 
his work. At the end of one the captain would 
explain the fun to the seriously interested mate 
(who had leaned forward to learn), placing spoons 
and crumbs to demonstrate the main points. ‘Then 
the mate, too, would join us with his happy laugh. 
The late and giddy laughter of the mate, when he 
also arrived, became a welcome feature of a yarn 
by the surgeon. We expected it. ‘The mate’s own 
stories were usually bawdy; he always prefaced 
them with some unmanageable hilarity, which im- 
peded his start. | 

Mater (pushing over his plate for soup). That 
big wave washed out the men’s berths, sir. 

Captain. ‘Then it did some good. The dirty 
brutes. 

Matz. Heard the men grumbling to-night. 
Said we'll never get the hawsers to run out with 
them bugs in the hawse pipes. Say the bugs don’t 
belong to them, sir—ship’s property. 


cy 





48 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


Doctor. Any this end of the ship, captain? 
Good Lord! 

Captain. Nota bug. And if there’s any for’ard 
the men brought ’em. No bugs in my ship. Never 
saw one in my cabin. 

Matt (making a confused effort to master his 
emotion, not to spill his soup, and to be respectful). 
Te-he! you will, sir, Te-he! (Realises he may not 
laugh, but suffers internally.) 

Carrain (indicates an interrogation with fright- 
ful eyes and guttural noises). 

Mare (controls himself by concentrating on a 
fork). Well, sir—Dm just telling you—I heard it 
said the men annoyed with bugs—some of ’em said 
seein’s believin-—said they had enough for every- 
body. (His voice breaks into a stifled falsetto) So 
they emptied a match—match—they emptied a 
match box full down your ventilator this morning. 


The captain would frequently keep his seat in the — 
saloon after dinner till he had finished his cigar, 
and in the vein, would put a leg over the arm of 
his chair, which he had pushed back (his chair was 
cushioned, and was not a fixture), and frowning at 
his cigar, as if for defects, would voyage again his 
early seas. I suppose a sailor would call our skip- 
per a hard case. He was an elderly man, tall, 
spare, and meagrely bearded. His eyes were set 
close into a knife-like nose, and they were opaque 
and bright, like two blue stones under a forehead 
which narrowed and tightened into a small shiny 
cranium. There were tufts of grey wool above his » 


~ 


Bee 
NG 


re 
Geyitni™ 


C3 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 49 


temples. No light came through his eyes to make 
them limpid, except when he was fondling Tinker, 
the dog. ‘They shone from the surface, giving him 
a look of peering and intent suspicion. The skin 
of his face, neck and hands, now worked a little 
loose, was so steeped in the tincture of sunshine 
that it had preserved an unctious child-like quality. 
His dress and habits betrayed an appreciation of 
his own person. He kept his own medicines. 

I guessed he would have a ruthless process in an 
emergency; he would identify the success and 
safety of the ship with his own. He laughed from 
his mouth only, throwing his head back, showing 
surprisingly perfect teeth, and laughter did not 
change the, crystalline glitter of his eyes. There 
was something alien and startling in his merriment. 
As though his own mind were too cold for him at 
times he would seek out me, or the chief, to find 
warmth-in an argument. He would irritate us into 
a disputation; and though he’was a choleric man, 
quick at opposition, yet his vocabulary then was 
flinty and sparse, It stuck, and ‘was delivered with 
pain. You could think of him labouri ing at his views 
of men and affairs with a creaking slate pencil. He 
set one’s teeth., But he was a sailor, cautious and 
bold, with a knowledge of ships and the sea that 
Was a mine to me. Let me say that, during the 
voyage, I found him busy making’ a canvas cot. 
He sat on the poop and worked there, bent and 
patient as a seamstress, for days. With a judg- 
ment made too readily I believed-he was, naturally, 
making it for his own comfort; against the heat of 


” 


50 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


the river. When it was finished he was rolling up 
his ball of yarn, surveying his job, and he said, 
mumbling and shy, that the cot was for me. 

The Skipper, on this day that our decks were 
swept, swore about the men and the bugs durin 
dinner, muttered with foreboding about the glass, 
which was. still falling, and the coals, which were 
being burnt to no purpose. We were hardly doing 
more than holding our place on our course. ‘The 
saloon was delirious, and when she flung up her 
heels, the varied noises rose with the racing pro- 
peller to a crescendo of furious castenets, ‘The mate 
let us. The Skipper sat glooming, eyeing his cigar 
resentfully, his leg over the arm of his chair. The 
Doctor was swaying with the ship, weary and for- 
lorn. Tinker had an appeal in his eyes, and made 
timorous noises. ‘The Purser wondered why he 
was there at all, and blamed his silly dreams. ‘The 
night boomed without. What a night! 

Skipper. If this southerly wind goes round to 
the west and north, look out. I saw porpoises to- 
day too. f 

Docror. When are we due at Para? 

SKIPPER. Huh! What’s this talk of Para? 
You wait. All this talk about when we shall get 
there’s no good. . . . Now in those Newfoundland 
schooners where I served my time—I wouldn’t have 
no talk in them about getting anywhere. Seems 
as if somebody heard. You always run into it. 
There was the “Lizzie Polwith.” She was about 
80 tons. Those west country schooners in the fish 
trade are never more than 100 tons, else they’d have 









THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE © 5x 


to carry more than a master and one mate. I was 
her master, and a kid of eighteen. We left Fal- 
mouth for Cadiz. Now look what happened. My 
mate was old Tregenna. He was a regular misery. 
I never knew such a dead homer, not so much as he 
was, always wanting to talk about his wife. I say, 
when you've cast off, it’s best not to have a home. 
The ship wants all you can give her. Tregenna, 
he looked back a lot. You know what I mean. 
Couldn’t keep his mind on his Job, but wished he 
was through with it. There he’d be cutting bread 
at dinner, and it ’ud remind him, and he’d be wish- 
ing he was cutting it at home. When things began 
to go stiff, he’d say, “who wouldn’t sell his little 
farm to go to sea?” Used to figure out on paper 
how long we'd be before we’d be back. Why, you 
never know when you'll get back. 

See what happened. We left Cadiz that year 
on the first of January, and got things just right. 
The winds chased us over. There were big follow- 
ing seas, but you know those schooners ride like 
ducks. Up and over they go. Never a drop did we 
ship. ‘Though they’re lively enough to bruise and 
sicken all but good sailors. And old Tregenna was 
rubbing his hands and making out his figures better 
and better. 

We arrived off St. Johns in a bit more than three 
weeks. I reckon I’d done it all right, being such 
a young chap too. Well, I was turning in that 
night, and just as I got into the companion a man 
said, “There goes a lump of ice.” I jumped out 
again. Why, there was ice all round us. The sea 


52 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


was full of it as far as I could see into the night. 
“This is all along of your figuring,” I sang out to 
Tregenna. “But you'll have a lot of time to reckon 
it up afresh,” I said. 

So he had. Do you know when we got in? 
We got in on April 15. We were two months and 
a half getting in. And we came over in three weeks. 
There’s something in that Jonah story. Always 
some fool who can’t keep his mouth shut and his 
mind on his job. 

We did have a time. Two and a half months, 
and our provisions ran out. We were living on a 
little meal and dried peas. The ice chafed the 
“Lizzie” till the rudder was worn down to the 
stock. It roughed up her wooden sides till they 
looked'as if they were covered with long coarse hair. 
We were a sight when we got in. You wouldn’t 
have known us, hardly. We looked as if we'd come 
up from the bottom. . . . Don’t ask me when we 
shall get to Para. Wait till we’re out of this. 
Listen to that dog. Shut up, you Tinker. Making 
that noise, sir! Go and lie down. 

The Skipper clapped on his cap aggressively and 
went out. The Doctor had a long and eloquent 
silence. ‘Then he turned to me. ‘This beats all,” 
he said. “Come and have a drop of gin, old dear.” 
He led the way to his berth, which smelt of varnish 
and of lamp, and we swayed in chorus as the ship 
rolled, and had a heartening mourn together. But 
for its accidental compensations travel would not be 
worth the trouble. In proof of that there is the entry 
in my diary some days after: 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 53 


“December 22. Awoke at four a.m. with the ship 
rolling as brutally as ever. A great noise of waters 
and things banging. ‘The seas huge at sunrise, 
when the light came over their tops. Depressing 
sight. ‘The sky was blue at first, but was soon 
overcast with squalls. The horizon ahead gets 
slate coloured, and low clouds underneath, like 
ragged bales of dirty wool, come towards us heavy 
and fast. ‘Then the squall and waves rush down on 
us express, and the ship buries herself. Constantly 
hearing engine-room bell sounded from bridge to 
slacken speed as a big sea appears. The captain 
popped in his head as I was deciding whether to get 
up or stay where I was. He gazed sternly at me 
and said he was looking for Jonah. I half believe 
he means it too, Everybody is weary of this. The 
men have been in oilskins since the start. 

“Noon to-day, Lat. 42.6 N. Long. 11.10 W. 
Miles by engines since noon yesterday 222. Knots 
by revolutions 9.2. But the slip is 49.2 per cent. 
So actual distance 112 miles only, and knots 4.6. 
Bad going. Wind southly. Engines racing and 
engineer still at throttle. 

“Night, and a full moon tearing past cloud open- 
ings. The ship occasionally shows like a pale ghost, 
the black shadows of the funnel guys and stan- 
chions oscillating on the white paint-work as she 
rolls. I went into Chief’s cabin, and from its open 
door—for it was sensibly milder—looked out astern 
over the way we had come. Up and down, this side 
and that, went the steamer, and the Great Bear, in a 
wind clear patch of sky, was dancing on our wake. 


54 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


Polaris was making eccentric orbits round the main 
masthead light. Then the Skipper came in. He 
sat gazing astern. The look of his face was enough. 
It was quite plain he would like to be offended to- 
night, and attack anybody about anything. Pres- 
ently he started intently as he looked astern, and 
jumped from his seat crying the ultimate anathema 
on the chap at the wheel; and ran out. ‘The Chief 
glanced astern and laughed. “The old man comes in 
here because it’s uncommon handy for watching 
the wake. Look at it. Somebody on the bridge 
writing letters on the ocean. ‘Thinking of his sweet- 
heart, and her name is Sue.’ We gave the Skip- 
per’s voice time to reach the wheelhouse, and then 
saw the wake visibly tauten out. 

“T went aft, balancing like a man learning the 
tight rope, along the trestle bridge. The moon was 
still falling precipitously through the broken sky, 
and areas of the great seas, where the sweeping 
searchlight of the moon showed monsters shaping 
and slowly vanishing, were frightful. ‘There were ~ 
sudden expansions of vivid green lightnings in the 
north and east. I found the Doctor in the chief 
mate’s cabin. I sang some songs in a riving minor, 
accompanied by the mate on an accordion, for the 
doctor’s amusement, and discovered why sailors 
always use the accordion, previously a mystery to 
me. It has a sad and reflective note, suited to men 
with memories when alone on the ocean. It ought 
to fit Celtic bards better than the harp. It has a 
fine expiring moan. The mate gave an imitation 
of a dying man with it. 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 55 


“To bed at 11. Tried to read Henry James. My 
cockroach came out to wave his derisive hands at 
me. No wonder. The light was very bad, and I 
was pitched from side to side of the bunk. Nearly 
thrown out once. I might just as well have at- 
tempted to read the Bhagavad-Gita in the original. 
So I read the last letters from home instead and 
then fell asleep as a little child.” 

There was something of leisure in her movements 
next morning. I felt sure the glass must be rising 
at last. ‘The air felt lighter and more expansive. 
A peep through the port showed me the ceiling had 
gone up considerably in the night. There was little 
wind, for the waves, though as great as ever, had 
lost their white ridges. Their summits were rounded 
and smooth. We were running south out of it, 
though the residue of the dreary northern seas was 
still washing about the decks. It was December 
yesterday, but April to-day. The engineers’ mess- 
room boy, with bare fat arms, went by the cabin, 
singing. 

At breakfast we heard that Chips, who had re- 
tired to his bunk for some days past to mend a leg 
damaged when the hatches were in danger, had 
met with a still more serious misfortune. We fell 
into a mood of silent and respectful compassion. 
There was nothing to be said. Chips had lost his 
Victoria Cross. He was an old hero in trouble. 
The few of us who were British there—true, most 
of us were Germans, Dutchmen, Scandinavians, 
and Portuguese—felt we represented The Coun- 


56 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


try. Chips limped about the forecastle with re- 
proach in his face, and we felt we were petty in 
noticing his face was also dirty, though it certainly 
was difficult to avoid seeing that too, perhaps be- 
cause, and this can be said for us, the dirt was of 
longer standing than the reproach. Then again it 
is common knowledge that Chips sleeps in haut 
having no mattress. 

Chips’ story we knew. It had been whispered 
about the ship. He was at the Siege of Alexandria, 
and a shell fell near a group of men on his ship. 
Chips picked it up and dropped it overboard before - 
the fuse was finished. The Doctor and I felt espe- 
cially responsible, for a reason I cannot easily 
explain, it is so vague, and we told Chips we would 
help him in his search for his lost treasure. ‘This 
took us to Chips’ sea-chest, and amid a group of 
mask-like faces—for how could foreigners guess 
what this mattered to us’—we hunted carefully for 
Chips his aureole. We found—but I suppose even 
Victoria Cross heroes must dirty their socks. There 
were other things also. Yet it was out of one of 
these very other things, which were, I think, shirts, 
that there dropped, when the Doctor picked up the 
garment, a little package wrapped in newspaper. 
Chips, from his berth, gave a cry of joy. The 
Doctor and I, smiling too, looked upon the old man 
feeling that we had acted for you all. Chips, secre- 
tive with his sacrosanct emblem, was putting the 
little packet under his coverlet, when a low foreign 
sailor snatched it from him. The Cross fell to the 
deck. I recovered it from the feet instantly in a 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 57 


white passion, and chanced to look at it. It con- 
firmed that one, who is named Chips here, was 
something in the Royal and Ancient Order of Buf- 
faloes. 

Coming back from the fo’castle, suddenly I felt 
as the man of the suburbs does when, bowed with 
months of black winter and work in a city alley, he 
is, without any warning, transfigured on his own 
doorstep one morning. There as before is his 
familiar shrub, dripping with rain. Yet is it as 
before? It points a black finger at him. But the 
finger has a polished green nail. 

He is translated. His ears are opened, and there 
comes for the first time that year the silver whistle 
of the starlings. A touch of South is in the air. His 
burden falls. 

The cloudy sky was not grey now, but pearly, for 
it was translucent to the sun. More than day had 
come; life was born. There was ichor in the day. 
They were not dark northern waves that baffled us, 
but we were shoved and rocked by the send of a 
long nacreous ocean swell, firm but kind, from the 
south-west. The iron ship which had been repulsive 
to the touch, for its face had been glassy and cold, 
was now drying a warm rust red, like earth of 
Devon in spring, and was responsive. You could 
rest against its iron body and feel yourself grow. I 
‘saw the Chief outside his cabin in his shirt sleeves, 
‘gazing overseas between the stanchions of the boat 
deck, smoking in the evident luxury of full comfort 
and release. Involuntarily, he danced the two-step 
as she rolled. “Got anything to read?” he asked, 


58 | THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


Now that reminded me. We have no library, of 
course, but we have a circulation of books on 
board. There are no common shelves; but the book 
you left thoughtlessly on the skylight five minutes 
ago, while you went to find some matches, is gone 
when you return. And you, if you see a book lying 
open and unprotected in a cabin, glance round 
warily, dash in, and take it; very often only to 
discover to your bitter disappointment that it is one 
of your own, and not an adventurous and unread 
stranger. The Chief’s question reminded me that 
the day we left Swansea a lady (and a friend of 
poor Jack, the public is well aware) sent us a bale 
of literature. We blessed her when we saw its bulk, 
looking at it as oxen might look at a truss of hay, 
for that was its size and shape. 'Though it proved 
to be shavings and a cruel blow to the animals, as 
you shall hear. 

Here was the very day to get at that bale, and 
impatiently I rolled it into the open, It was trussed 
with great care, so I tore away a corner of the wrap- 
pings, dived in a hand, and hauled out a copy of 
“Joy Bells for Young Christians,” the November — 
number of 1899. 

Well. Anyhow, it was a clean copy, and I put it 
by as the portion of our baldheaded German 
steward. 

This disappomtment made me pause, though. 
Here was going to be a long job for the Purser, 
sorting out this. Supposing there was anything 
nutritious in the bale I did not mind the labour 
of the unpacking and the distribution; but if the 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 59 


bulk of the consignment was hailed, so to speak, 
by “Joy Bells,” then it would be better to call a 
deck hand and get the package overside before the 
ship was littered with too much of this joy. A 
Brazilian stoker, as he passed, saw me standing in 
thought, and I suppose imagined—for he could not 
ask—that I wanted to cut the string, but had no 
knife. Before I could stop him, he, smiling a know- 
ing and friendly smile, whipped out a blade from 
his rear; and at once we stood ankle-deep in liter- 
ature. There was a landslide near me of Infant 
Methodists (dates unknown) and I gave the Bra- 
zilian an armful for his kindness, 

Our dear unknown friend at Swansea, with her 
eye on our sailor-like but yet immortal souls, had 
heard, no doubt, at the annual meeting of the So- 
ciety for the Succor of Seamen, at Caxton Hall, 
Westminster (held on the 29th of every February), 
what simple and barbarous and yet, in the main, 
considering our origins and circumstances, what 
worthy fellows we were. But she was not told at 
the meeting that the wealthy shipowners, sub- 
scribers to the society, and whose presence there 
made Caxton Hall seem nautical, have a way of 
signing on crews at continental ports because wages 
rule lower there; and that consequently not one of 
our men was moved by Christian English, but only - 
by mates English, and then not so very quickly. 
The officers and engineers were English, and there 
the sailors’ friend was right in her surmise; but I 
do not see how she could have done more to put in 
awful jeopardy the soul of our wise and spectacled 


6o THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


chief engineer, for instance, than by approaching 
him with a winning and philanthropic smile, under 
the impulse to do him good with a statement of 
her religion in words of one syllable. He would 
have met her politely, I know; but after she had 
gone 

Let her try to imagine her own feelings if our 
Chief, uninvited and blankly unmindful, mvaded 
the exclusive inner circle of Swansea society, and 
approached her in the midst of her own with the 
childish notion of instructing her in the first prin- 
ciples of his pronounced Pyrrhonism; or say he 
went to her as a colporteur of the Society for In-- 
structing the Intelligence and Manners of Leisured 
Folk. But I must say for our chief that this cannot 
be even supposed. He would never offer the low- 
liest being such an indignity. 

We pulled and dragged at the escaped mass of — 
periodicals, looking for something good, but found 
no pearls had been cast before us. ‘There were 
parish magazines and temperance monthlies, there 
were religious almanacs for the years we have lost; 
by some sporting chance there were even a few back 
numbers of the “Monumental Mason.” It is plain 
the latter could be considered an added grievance, 
even though they were put in as a kindly reminder 
of our narrow lease here. It was an aggravation 
of the original offence to sailors who, when their 
short term here closes, have to make shift with some 
firebars at their heels. What is Aberdeen granite 
and indelible gold lettering to such men but a hint 





THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 61 


of the hardships which follow them even beyond 
the end? 

So overboard went the lot—I may as well tell the 
whole truth, overboard also went the evangelical 
hymn books, new though they were. I will only 
suppress the advice cried to the gulls astern as the 
literature went floating and flying in their direc- 
tion. We had to rely for our reading on what had 
been brought aboard by our crowd, a collection 
which gradually revealed itself in single books and 
magazines. 

There was, for example, the “Morphology of the 
Cryptogamia,” an exhaustive work which gave me 
much pleasure in wondering how it got aboard at 
all. The chief mate used it as a wedge between his 
open door and the bulkhead, to prevent the miser- 
able knocking as the ship lolled about. He would 
not lend me that book, because it jammed into the 
opening nicely; but I borrowed from him “Three 
Fingered Jack, the Terror of the Antilles,” and I 
made him a complete gift in return of “Robert 
Elsmere” which I found marooned on a bunker 
hatch as I came along. There you see the delight- 
ful chance and hazardous character of our litera- 
ture. 

I prided myself on the select reading I had 
brought aboard with me. But what devilish black 
art the sea air worked on those choice volumes, how- 
ever, I cannot explain. I have no means of know- 
ing. But there they are, their covers bitten by 

eockroaches, and the words inside bleached and 


* 


62 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


sterilised of all meaning. There they will stop; 
Henry James, too. For what is the use of him 
when big seas are running? He would be a magi- 
cian indeed who could capture our minds then. 
You get the right amplitude of leisure and the flat 
undistracting circumstances he demands, the empti- 
ness and the immobility necessary, when you are 
waiting for cargo long in coming at a low seaboard. 
I suppose we want the representation of life only 
when we are not very much alive. In heavy 
weather there is no doubt old newspapers make the 
best reading, especially if they have good bold 
advertisements. For I know it requires the same 
courage and concentration needed ashore for read- 
ing Another Great Speech by the Premier; indeed, 
the steel blue quality of deadly resolution used only 
by men of letters who write biographies and spin 
literary causeries, to manage even novels when great 
billows are moving. The mind is inclined to absent 
itself then. ‘Then it is you put all reading aside 
with a promise of a long and leisurely festival of 
books when the ship is steaming uniformly down © 
the unvarying “trades.” 

But when you get near the neighbourhood of the 
constant sun, during the day you fall asleep over 
“Three Fingered Jack’ and the old magazines 
which you had on your knees while musing on the 
colours of the sea and the mounting architecture of 
the clouds; and beyond sundown listen to the mate’s 
accordion or the engineer’s flute. Perhaps, moved 
by the hu-s-s-h of the waves, the silky and purple 
dark, and the loneliness of your little company 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 63 


under the mid-ocean stars, tentatively (though 
your shipmates are very forgiving) lift a ballad 
yourself; for something is expected of you, and 
singing seems right. 

Of all the books aboard the “Capella” I got most 
out of the Skipper’s sailing directories and _ his 
charts. Talk of romance! There was that chart- 
room under the bridge, across its open doors on 
either side creaming waves going by in the moon- 
light, and the steamer inclining each side alter- 
nately, and the shadows of the rigging sliding back 
and forth on the pale deck. You cannot know what 
romance is till you are in seas you have never sailed 
before, where the marks will be few when landfall 
comes; that ocean where the Skipper is to find his 
own way by his lore of the sea, and may even ask 
your opinion about alternatives; and there read 
sailing directories. ‘The romance of these books 
cannot be translated or quoted. It would leave 
them, as though a glimmer went out, if you at- 
tempted to take them from that chart-room where 
pendant things are swaying leisurely, where you 
can hear the bells tell the watches, and the skipper’s 
gold-laced cap is on the mahogany table. The South 
Atlantic Sailing Directions, our own guide, is fine, 
especially when it gets down to the uninhabited 
islands in far southern latitudes. I do not think 
this noble volume is included in the best hundred 
books, but I know it can release the mind from the 
body. 

But what’s this talk of landfalls? as the old man 
would say. There will be no landfall yet for us; 


64. THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


and this is Christmas Eve. I knew it was an aus- 
picious occasion of some kind, for the steward just 
went aft with two big plum cakes cuddled in his 
apron. That made me look at the calendar. We 
are now 800 miles out, and the steamer has reached 
six knots. ‘This was the best night we had yet 
found., The steamer was on an even keel, with but 
occasional spasms of sharp rolling, for there was 
no sea, but only old ocean breathing deeply and 
regularly in its sleep, and sometimes making a 
slight movement. The light of the full moon was 
the shining ghost of noon. The steamer was dis- 
tinct but immaterial, saliently accentuated, as a 
phantom. A deep shadow would have detached 
the forecastle head but for a length of luminous 
bulwark which still held it, and some quiet voices 
of men who were within the shadow, yarning. The 
line of bulwark and the murmuring voices held us 
together. The prow as it dipped sank into drifts 
of lambent snow. The snow fled by the steamer’s 
sides, melting and musical. 'Two engineers off duty 
leaned on the rails amidships, smoking, looking into 
the vacancy in which the moonlight laid a floor of 
troubled silver. Asif drawn by its light a few little 
clouds were poised near the moon, grouped round 
the bright heart of the night. There was the moon 
and its small company of clouds, and ourselves 
below in our own defined allotment of sea. The 
only thing outside and far was Sirius, burning in- 
dependently in the east, looking unwinking through 
the wall of night into our world. 

On such a night and with Christmas morning but 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 65 


sixty minutes away it would have been wasting life 
to go to bed. I glanced expectantly at the door of 
the Chief’s cabin, and saw indeed it was open, a 
yellow rectangle within which was the profile of the 
Chief beneath his lamp, talking to somebody. The 
Doctor was there, and he made room for me on the 
settee. Then the captain joined us, and I perched 
myself on the wash-stand. 

“Well, we can undress to-night when we turn 
in,’ said the Chief. (None of us had, so far.) Ina 
long silence which filled the cabin with tobacco 
smoke I could hear the engines below uplifted in 
confident song. 

“Now they’re walking round,” said the Skipper, 
nodding his head. “Now she feels it.” 


When we met thus, between the hours of nine and 
midnight, as was our irregular habit, the talk first 
was always desultory, and about our own ship and 
our own circumstances, for the concerns of our little . 
world strangely occupied our minds, as you would 
think, and the large affairs of that great world we 
had left, of which we heard now no sound nor 
rumour, had lessened in the mind, faded and van- 
ished, all the huge consequence and loud clangour 
of it, so that now there was an empty horizon astern, 
and nothing between us and that void but a few 
gulls, like small and pursuing recollections. Our 
little microcosm, afloat and sundered in the wastes, 
was occupied in its own polity. We talked of the 
carpenter’s bad leg; complained of the cook’s bread; 
heard that Tinker the dog, being young, had the 


66 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


habit at night, while honest folk slept, of eating the 
saloon mats; grumbled that the ship’s tobacco was 
mouldy. ‘The deck was getting dry, the Skipper 
said, and now we could get the men chipping it, 
and then it could be tarred. 

“That donkeyman,” said the Skipper, “that man 
wastes the fresh water. ITIl have a lock put on 
the pump handle. He works it as if we were laid 
out to the main. I spoke to him about it this morn- 
ing.” The fresh water is a vital affair with us. We 
may not drink the water of the country to which we 
are bound, so eighty tons of Welsh mountain spring 
is in our cleansed and whitewashed tanks. Woe to 
the man caught overflowing his can, if an officer sees 
him. “The handle can’t be locked,” said the Chief, 
“because its next to the galley. The cook wants 
it all day long.” 

“Well, let me catch anyone wasting it. Wed 
look all right with a lot of dysentery, drinking that 
river water out there.” 

This common meeting-place of ours, the Chief’s 
cabin, is on a highway of the ship, being on the 
direct route from the poop to the bridge, and so it 
is a hostel, for the Chief is a kindly and popular 
man, big and robust in body and mind; though he 
has a knack, at odd and unexpected times, of being 
candid in a way that shocks, treading on corns with- 
out ruth, the Skipper’s particularly, when their two 
departments are at a difference. 

This cabin was one which I always visited first, 
for, especially in the morning when other folk had 
not rubbed the night out of their eyes, and so looked 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 67 


darkly upon their fellows, my friend the Chief had 
the early eye of a child and the soaring spirit of the 
lark. I never met him when he had got out of bed 
on the wrong side. His cabin became a refuge to 
me, for, unlike the Doctor’s and my own place (we 
both were birds of passage, therefore our cabins 
were cold and stark), the Chief’s was comfortable 
with settled furniture, cosy and habitable, like a 
fixed home. ‘There was a wicker chair, with cush- 
ions, and a writing-desk where the engineer’s log 
lay handy and bearing some plug tobacco, freshly 
cut, on its cover, and a pipe rack above the desk 
carrying a most foul assortment waiting their turns 
again for favour. Portraits of the Chief’s family 
were on the walls, smiling boys and girls, with their 
mother in a chief place, looking upon daddy by 
proxy. ‘There was a book-shelf bearing some engi- 
neering manuals, a few novels and magazines, a 
tape measure, some gauge glasses, some tin whistles, 
a flute, and a palm leaf fan. Above the wash-stand 
was a rack with glasses and a carafe. A settee ran 
along one side, and his bunk upon the other side. 
There we sat on Christmas Eve, while the wicker 
chair bent and complained with the Skipper’s 
weight as he swayed to the leisurely rocking of the 
ship. The tobacco smoke floated in coils and blue 
smears in the room. A bottle of Hollands rested 
for security on the bed, and we held our glasses on 
our knees. 

The pallid and puffy face of the steward, a very 
honest man secretly free with his small store of 
apples on my account because I am green and my 


68 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


palate not*yet used to the flatness of tinned pro- 
visions, looked in on us from the right. ‘“Vhere is 
der dog, sir? I haf not seen der dog.” “Must be 
about,” we cried. “We had seen him,” we said, 
“nosing about the poop for rats, or asleep on the 
saloon mat, or padding round the casing looking 
for friends.” “But no, I haf looked. He is not 
found. Vhere is der dog?” A hole in our little 
community, it was apparent from our intent looks, 
could not be thought of with equanimity. Tinker’s 
importance became quite large. ‘The second engi- 
neer passed the door, caught the drift of our anx- 
ious converse, and turned to say the dog was then 
asleep in his room. “Ach! zat is all right.” We 
struck matches for our pipes again. 

“That dog, I shouldn’t like to lose him,” said the 
Skipper, stroking his beard. “There’s no lick in 
that. I shot a dog once on a ship; and first we ran 
into a blow and lost a lot of gear, and then the mate 
got his hand smashed, and then everything got 
cross-grained till I’d have paid, ah, fifty pounds te 
have had the brute back again, and an ugly cus- 
tomer he was. Ah, you can smile, Doctor, but there 
it is. I’m not superstitious and never was. But 
you can’t tell me. Look at the things that hap- 
pen. When I was a youngster, my ship was off 
Rio, and I dreamt my father was dead. I took my 
bearings and the time. I dreamt my father died in 
a red brick house with a laylock tree by the door 
and that tree was in blossom plain enough to smell. 
I didn’t know the house. There was a path of clean 
red bricks leading up to the porch, through a gar- 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 69 


den. I didn’t see my father. But you know what 
dreams are like—no sense in them—there the house 
was and not a soul in sight. I knew he was dying 
inside it.” 

“How do you account for that? Have you got it 
down in your books? [I lay you haven’t. I forgot all 
about that dream. Long after I was at Cape Town 
and met my brother. That reminded me. After 
a bit I said to him, ‘Father’s dead.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, 
‘but how did you know?’ Said I, ‘Was the house 
like this?? and I told him. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it was 
like that. A place he was staying atin Essex. But 
how did you know? I didn’t tell him. What’s the 
good? He wouldn’t have believed it. People don’t.” 

All through the anxious time when we were being 
soused and buffeted I noticed how our company, 
every man of them, even the Pyrrhonist, saw omens 
in all the chance variety of the vast menace under 
the frown of which we huddled in our iron box; 
porpoises alongside; one of Mother Cary’s dark 
brood accompanying us, glancing about the 
vagaries of the flowing hills with swift precision; 
the form of a cloud; a loom far out, as though day 
were there at least. The fall of a portrait in the 
Chief’s room once set him wondering and melan- 
choly. Again, when the dog whined and moped, 
the Skipper eyed the animal narrowly, as though 
the creature had prescience but could tell us what it 
knew only by drooping and quivering its hind quar- 
ters. You might have thought that Fate, dumb 
and cruel, but a little relenting for something in- 
evitably to come to our mishap, were trying to 


70 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


stretch a point, and so induced the Skipper to put 
his shirt on inside out one morning, after dreaming 
he saw drowned rats, in case the horse were not too 
blind to see both the nod and the wink. 

The Sphinx makes subtle. dumb motions, as it 
were, when closely regarded. I do not wonder if 
. it does. Sometimes in those dark days I thought I 
got a hint or two. I cannot tell you what they were. 
The weather grew brighter afterwards and I forgot 
them. From our narrow and weltering security, 
where the wind searched through us like the judg- 
ment eye, I know, looking out upon the wilderness 
in turmoil where was no help, and no witness of our 
undoing, where the gleams were fleeting as though 
the very day were riven and tumbling, that I saw 
the filmy shapes of those things which darken the 
minds of primitives. While the sky is changeful, 
and there are storms at sea when our fellows are ab- 
sent, and mischance and death are veiled but here, 
we shall have gods and ghosts. The sharp-sighted 
collectors of old brain-lumber and such curios may 
still keep busy, and tie up their dry bundles of 
mythology and religions; but I myself could make 
plenty more. 

So it was my shipmates’ yarns were most of the 
dire kind, with some dim warning precedent. I do 
not recall a story that was gay, except those of the 
wanton sort. They were of close calls and of wom- 
en, as, I suppose, have been those of all hard 
livers, from the cave men on. 

Eight bells were rung on the bridge, and, like a 
faint echo in a higher pitch, answered from the 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 71 


fo’castle. Christmas morning! By my pocket com- 
pass we toasted the folk at home. We had heard a 
_ good many stories of wreck this night, and the 
Chief was now at his contribution to the unseason- 
able memories. (“I’ve had enough of it. Here 
goes,’ said the Doctor; and he went.) “Don’t 
leave us. It lets in the draught. Well, the compli- 
ments to you. This typhoon—I had had four oth- 
ers—but this one made me think it was good-bye. 
She was a small steamer, that ‘Samuel Plimsoll,’ 
and old, but well-behaved. But her light nearly 
went out in that blow. It was that dark you could 
find nothing but the noise, and we were just the 
same as a chunk of wood under a waterfall, because 
the Lord knows how many feet of water were in the 
engine-room, for she was rolling so. Her fires were 
out. She had a list of 22 degrees to port. She 
simply Jay in it, and it went over her. Every time 
_ she rolled over on the deep side, thinks I, this is the 
 Jast of her. All this, mind you, went on for two 
days, and the skipper was in the chart-room, wait- 
ing. I’ve found that when the danger is not much 
you get excited, but when there seems no chance 
you get cool and cunning and try to make one. 
One time I thought she seemed easier, and I was 
able to get the donkey engine going. I felt better 
as soon as I heard the steam, even though it was only 
in the donkey. Thinks I, there’s power, and it’s 
mine—a canful of steam to a typhoon. It was a 
chance to laugh at. Then 1 took the other engi- 
neers with me and we went below. The water there, 
full of cinders and trash, pouring through the gear 


72 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


as she turned from side to side, made it look a 
pretty poor show. You see, the donkey wouldn't 
work the pumps, for the coal and muck were sucked 
in. So I took a basket and got into the tank, hold- 
ing the basket under the pump. The water was up 
to my neck, and every time she rolled I was ducked. 
But the dodge worked, and that list of hers to port 
was a bit of luck in its way, for it helped us to get 
the starboard boiler going. When I saw the throws 
moving, and the wash angry when it splashed on the 
hot metal, I said, ‘So much for your old typhoon.’ 
We were not counted out then. We crawled under 
the lee of an island, and lay for four days repairing 
her. The funny thing was when we got to Hong 
Kong the papers were full of our loss. *“Samuel _ 
Plimsoll” lost with all hands.’ It was funny to see 
a bill like that. I met the placard as it came run- 
ning round a corner, and it made me stand and 
shuffle my feet on the ground to see if the earth was 
all right. I knew the editor of that paper, and I 
was then going up to give him something good. 
And here he was making money out of us like that. 
He stood at the door of his office and saw me com- 
ing. I went up laughing, waving his paper in my 
hand. He looked quite surprised. His mouth was 
wide open. ‘You're a nice sort of chap, I said.” 


Christmas Day. In case it has become necessary 
for me to show again the symbols of verity, as this 
is a book of travel, here they are: “Lat. 37.2 N., 
long. 14.14 W. Light wind and moderate swell 
from $.W. Vessel rolling heavily at intervals. 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 73, 


961 miles out. Miles by engines 226. Actual dis- 
tance travelled (because of the swell on our star- 
board bow) 197 miles.” I cannot see that these 
particulars do more than help me out with the book, 
but as they have been considered essential in narra- 
tives of voyaging, here they are, and much good 
may they do anybody. Thoreau, in one of his 
quaintly superior moods when speaking of travel, 
said, “It is not worth while going round the world 
to count the cats in Zanzibar.” In nearly every 
book of travel this is proved to be true. They show 
it was not worth the while, seeing it was either to 
shoot cats or to count degrees of latitude. (As for 
me, I have no reason whatever for being at sea.) 
Consider Arctic travel. I have read long rows of 
books on that, but recall few emotional moments. 
The finest passage in any book of Arctic travel is in 
Warburton Pikes’ “Barren Grounds,” where he 
quotes what the Indian said to the missionary who 
had been speaking of heaven. The Indian asked, 
“And is it like the land of the Musk-ox in summer, 
when the mist is on the lakes, and the loon cries very 
often?” 

You feel at once that the country the Indian saw 
around him would be easily missed by us, even when 
in the midst of it. For taking the bearings of such 
a land, the sextant, and the miles already travelled, 
would not be factors to help much. Now the Indian 
knew nothing of artificial horizons and the aids to 
discovering where they are which strangers use. 
But in summer the mists of his lakes were but the 
vapour of his musings, the penumbra of the un- 


74. THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


fathomed deeps of his mind whereon he paddled his 
own canoe; and when the wild-fow] called, it was his 
memory heard; it was his thought become vocal 
then while he dreamed on. I myself learned that 
the treasures found in travel, the chance rewards 
of travel which make it worth while, cannot be 
accounted beforehand, and seldom are matters a 
listener would care to hear about afterwards; for 
they have no substance. ‘They are no matter. 
They are untranslatable from their time and place; 
and like the man who unwittingly les down to 
sleep on the tumulus where the little people dance 
on midsummer night, and dreams that in the place 
where man has never been his pockets were filled 
with fairy gold, waking to find pebbles there in- 
stead, so the traveller cannot prove the dreams he 
had, showing us only pebbles when he tries. Such 
fair things cannot be taken from the magic moment. 
They are but filmy, high in the ceiling of your 
thoughts then, rosy and sunlit by the chance of the 
light, transitory, melting as you watch. You come 
down to your lead again. ‘These occasions are not 
on your itinerary. They are like the Indian’s lakes 
in summer. ‘They have no names. ‘They cannot 
be found on the best maps. Not you nor any other 
will ever discover them again. Nor do they fill the 
hunger which sent you travelling; they are not 
provender for notebooks. ‘They do not come to 
accord with your mood, but they come unaware to 
compel, and it is your own adverse and darkling 
atoms that are changed, at once dancing in accord 
with the rare incidence of that unreasonable and 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 75 


transcendent moment of your world, the rhythm of 
_ which you feel, as you would the beat of drums. 

And what are these things ?—but how can we tell? 
A strip of coral beach, as once I saw it, which was 
as all other coral beaches; but the ship passed 
close in, and by favour of the hour and the sun this 
strand did not glare, but was resplendent, and the 
colours of the sea, green, gold, and purple, were not 
its common virtues, but the emotional and passing 
attar of those hues. There was the long, slow la- 
bouring of our burdened tramp in the Atlantic 
storm. Or one April, and a wild cherry-tree in 
blossom by an English hedge, a white cloud tinc- 
tured with rose, and in it moving a dozen tropical 
chaffinches; the petals were on the grass. 

And now, this is Christmas morning. I am in 
the Chief’s bunk, and he still sleeps on the settee. 
We fell asleep where we lay yarning on our backs 
after midnight. I wake at the right moment, open- 
ing my eyes with the serene and secure conviction 
that things are very well. The slow rocking of the 
ship is perfect rest. There is no sound but the faint 
tap-tap of something loose on the desk and re- 
sponding to the ship’s movements. The cabin is 
strangely illuminated to its deepest corner by an 
extraordinary light, as though the intense glow of a 
rare dawn had penetrated even our ironwork. On 
the white top of the cabin a bright moon quivers 
about, the shine from live waters sent up through 
the round of our port. When we lean over, the 
port shows first the roof of the alleyway dappled 
with bright reflections; then a circle of sky, which 


76 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


the horizon soon halves; and then the dazzling white 
and blue of the near waves; we reverse. : 

This is life. This is what I have come for. I do — 
not repose merely in a bunk. I am prone and easy 
in the deepest assurance of good. ‘This conviction 
has penetrated even the unconsciousness of the 
Chief; he snores in profound luxury. If in a ship 
you are brought sometimes too cruelly close to the 
scrutiny of the terms of your narrow tenure, ex- 
pecting momentarily to see the document torn 
across by invisible fingers, yet nowhere else do you 
feel those terms to be so suddenly expanded in the 
sun. And nowhere else is got such release, secure 
and absolute, from the nudging of insistent trifles. 
There is nothing between your eyes and the con- 
fines of your own place. Empty day is all round. 
In the entire circle there is not the farthest im- 
pertinent interruption—through all the degrees 
there is not one fool standing in the light; and you 
yourself are on nobody’s horizon. No history stains 
that place. There is not a black doubt anywhere. 
It is the first day again, and no need yet for a rub- 
bish heap. 

Yet when, singing to myself, I went outside to 
matins, I found Sandy our third engmeer with the 
toothache. So much of truth is got from being a 
gymnosophist and regarding your own toes with 
aloof abstraction on a sunny Christmas morning. 
I became Sandy’s courage for him instead, took his 
arm firmly, and led him aft to the doctor. We 
would start a rubbish heap for a pristine world with 
a decayed tooth. Something to be going on with. 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 77 


Seeing we were almost off Madeira we had some 
amount of right to the July sun under which we had 
run. For the first time since the Mumbles our decks 
were quite dry, and cherry red with rust. There 
were glittering crusts of salt in odd places. At 
eight bells (midday) the captain ordered a general 
holiday, except for the routine duties; and the 
donkey-man appeared to startle us as the appari- 
tion of a stranger on the ship, for he had a clean 
face, though his eyes still were dark and spectral, 
and he wore a suit of new dungarees, stiff and 
creased from a paper parcel, but just opened, out of 
a Swansea slop shop. His mates were some sec- 
onds realising him. Then they made derisive signs, 
and the boldest some ribald cries. I thought their 
resentment was really aroused by Donkey’s new 
shirt; it was that touch which pushed matters too 
far, and made him unfriendly. He saw this him- 
self. Soon he changed the new shirt for one that 
had been rendered neutral in the stoke-hold and 
the bucket. 

There was something neutral, like Donkey’s old 
shirt, about most of our crowd. Each one of the 
mob which gathered with mess kits a little before 
_ midday about the galley door seemed reduced, was 
faded in a noticeable measure from the sharp and 
strong pattern of aman. Their conversation about 
the galley was always in subdued mutterings, not 
direct, but out of the mouth corners, sideways. 
Their only independence was in the negligence of 
their attitudes. They might have been keeping in 
mind an austere and invisible presence, whose swift 


78 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


words from nowhere might at any time cleave their 
soft babble. If I made to pass through them the 
babble ceased, and from limp poses they sprang 
upright in the narrow way to let me pass, their eyes 
cast down. A man who had not seen me coming, 
but still sprawled on the rail, talking quietly, would 
be nudged by his neighbour. It struck me this 
attitude would change when they knew us better; 
but it never did. These deckhands and firemen were 
mostly youngsters, steadied by a few older hands. 
Chips and Donkey were the veterans. In that 
crowd the boatswain was the admirable figure. He 
was a young Britisher, tall, upright, and weighty, 
with a smiling, respectful eye in which sometimes, 
I thought, there was a faint hint of mockery. He 
had an easy balance and confidence in his move- 
ments which made him worth watching when about 
his business. Clean shaven when he came aboard, he 
now had a tawny beard which caught gold lights, 
and it was singularly good on his weather-darkened 
face. He seldom wore a cap, for it could have 
added little protection to the taut vigour of his hair, 
and would have spoilt, as perhaps he himself 
guessed, that proper flourish and climax to the poise 
of his head. 

Donkey was an Irishman, and he was the huge 
frame of what, maybe thirty years before, had been. 
a powerful man. This morning his big cadaverous 
face, white only on the bony ridges surrounding 
the depressions of the temples, the cheeks, and the 
dark pits of the eyes, and with the shadowy hollow 
of the mouth which gaped through the weight of the 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 79 


massive jaw, would have resembled, from a little 
distance, that of a skeleton head of one of the 
monsters in a geological gallery, but for the dewlap 
sustained by sinews running from his chin down his 
throat. Donkey was a silent man, and never caught 
your glance as you passed him, but lumbered along 
with so much of the surprising celerity of a gaunt 
_ elephant that you thought you might hear the rasp 
of his loose clothes. He was a simple and docile 
fellow. I never heard him speak, but he used to 
come to the Chief, fill the door with his massive 
front, his small eyes which expressed nothing and 
were but sparks of life, looking nowhere in par- 
ticular, and make guttural sounds; and the Chief, 
being used to him, understood. At sea Donkey did 
his small duties like a plain but cumbersome mech- 
anism that had somewhere in it an obscure point 
of rationality. When ashore, though, he was said 
to go mad, and to roll trampling and trumpeting 
through the squalid littoral of the world; being 
brought aboard afterwards an enormity of lax bones 
and flesh, with the cogitating glim in his bulk quite | 
doused. 

Of the others, there was a Teutonic bunch of lads, 
deck-hands, which I never succeeded in segregating, 
they looked so much alike. They had pimpled, 
idle faces, and neutral eyes, cast down when they 
sidled by one, thin down on their chins, and grimy 
raiment which, by the look of it, was an integument 
never cast after we left port. One name would have 
covered that lot, and frequently I heard the mates 
use it. But Olsen, the Norwegian with a blond 


80 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


moustache which covered his mouth like a fog-pro- 
tector, and stern blue eyes, was a sailor. ‘The fire- 
men made a better bunch. There was among them 
a swarthy Brazilian, whose constant smile seemed 
ever on the point of breaking into song, but that he 
was always chewing the end of a sweat rag he wore 
twisted round his neck. The happy feature of our 
- firemen was a Dutchman, whose hollow face was 
full of silent woe and endurance. He was our chief 
joy. When once we found the sun, he then ap- 
peared in a single garment, trousers and braces cut 
in one piece of brown canvas, hauled up well under 
his arms, leaving his slab feet remote and forlorn. 
His torso was bare, a dancing girl in red and blue 
tattooed on his chest. He wore a bowler hat with- 
out a brim, 

We will get Christmas over. It was a pagan 
festival. Looking back at it, I see—with the aston- 
ishment of the sedate who is native to a geometrical 
suburb where the morning train follows the night 
and every numbered house shelters a moral agnos- 
tic—I see a dancing baccanal with free gestures who 
fades; as'I look back intently, doubting my senses, 
in a roseous haze. ‘The lawless movements of that 
wild, bright and laughing figure, its exultant blas- 
phemy, its confident mockery, are remembered by 
me as though once I had been admitted to the green 
room of heaven. Surely I have seen a god whose 
deathless knowledge derides the solemn gods, be- 
hind the curtain. It was Christmas night, and our 
little “Capella,” our point of night shine, a star 
moving through the void to its dark destiny, filled 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 81 


the vault with its song, while its fellows in the 
heavens stood round. Christmas is over. 


The day following was Sunday, a grey day of 
penance, the men soberly washing their shirts in 
buckets under the forecastle head, smoking moody 
pipes. The garments were tied to any convenient 
gear where they could hang free. The sky was 
leaden. This grey day was distinguished by the 
strange phenomenon of an horizon which was almost 
level; the skyline and the clouds did not slant first 
this way, then that. The swell had almost gone. 
Already I began to feel the large patience and 
tranquillity of a mind losing its shadows, and con- 
templating the light and space of a long voyage in 
which the same men do the same things in the same 
place daily under the centre of the empty sky. 
Sitting on a hatch with the Doctor, smoking, we 
confessed, with ease at the heart, and with minds in 
which nervous vibrations had ceased, that we must 
have reached the place that was nowhere, and that 
now time was not for us. We had escaped you all. 
We were free. There was not anything to engage 
us. There was nothing to do, and nobody who 
wanted us. Never before had I felt so still and 
conscious of myself. I realised, with a little start 
of surprise, that it was Me who felt the warm air, 
and who looked at the slow pulse of the waters, and 
the fulgent breaks in the roof, and heard the dron- 
ing of the wake, and not that mere skin, eyes and 
ears which, as in London, break in upon our pre- 
occupied minds with agitating sensations; and I 


82 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


took in this newly-discovered world of ocean and 
cloudland and my own sure identity centred therein 
with the complacency of an immortal who will see 
all the things which do not matter pass away. 
When we left England we were tense, and some- 
times white (though there were others who went 
red) about a Great Crisis in our Country’s His- 
tory. The Doctor and I arrived on board, detached 
from the opposing armies in the impending conflict, 
and at first put our hands swiftly to our swords 
every ten minutes or so during meals. Of that 
crisis only one small gull now was left, and he was 
following us astern with a melancholy cry at in- 
tervals, of which we took no more notice. (And 
that gull departed, I see by my diary, the very next 
day.) , 

So ended the Great Crisis. I did not even note 
the ship’s position at the time, though I can see now 
that was a serious fault for which future historians 
may blame me. I can but state vaguely that it was 
about sixty miles north-west of the Fortunate Isles. 
The change in the quality of the sun and air became - 
most marked; I remember that. ‘The horizon ex- 
panded to a surprising distance. According to 
letters from home, sent about that date, which I 
received long afterwards, I am unable to find that 
similar phenomena were witnessed in England. 
Probably they were but local. These manifesta- 
tions in the heavens filled the few of us privileged 
to witness them with awe, and a new faith in the 
power and compassion of God. Nothing further of 
note occurred on this day, except that Chips, as a 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 83 


further miracle, suddenly was raised whole from 
where he lay in his bunk with a useless leg. His 
leg, you may remember, was damaged in the gale 
off Cornwall. The Doctor, going his rounds, was 
surprised to find Chips dancing the hoola-hoola in 
the forecastle, and a stoker, with a cut eye, wailing 
for a lost half bottle of gin taken from his box while 
he was on duty. Thereafter Chips returned to 
work, his leg becoming halt again only when he 
knew we saw him stepping it too blithely. 


“Decr. 27. Distance run for past 24 hours to 
midday 219. ‘Total distance 1177 miles. Fine 
weather. Glass rising.” 

Have you ever heard of the monotony of a long 
voyage? ‘The same sky you know, the same waters, 
the same deck; and now I can see it should be 
added, the same old self, dismayed by the con- 
templation of its features daily, week after week, 
within that spacious empty hall, where is no escape 
from the bright stare overhead which reveals your 
_ baldness and blemishes without ruth. You get 
found out. You want to mix with the mob again, 
to get lost in the sameness of your fellows. He who 
goes travelling should leave his self at home, or as 
much of it as is not wanted on the voyage. It is 
surprising to find how little you want of yourself. 
The ideal traveller would venture out merely as a 
disembodied thought, or, at most, as an eye. 

A mere eye would see no monotony, for the sky 
may be the same sky, but its moods are like those 
of the same woman; and the ocean, though young 


84. THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


as the morning, is older than Asia—you never know 
what to expect from that profound enigma. As for 
the sunny deck, I see the Doctor sitting on a spare 
spar, waiting for someone to sit beside him. The 
Chief is filing a piece of small gear outside his cabin. 
The Skipper is overlooking, with a hard frown, a 
group of men busy repairing his chart-room, which 
is Just foreward of the engine-room casing (I could 
get a job from him at once for the asking, though I 
shall not ask). The first mate is trying to be in 
three places at once. The second mate patrols the 
bridge. ‘The German steward, who tells curious 
stories in a Teutonised dialect of Shadwell, is hang- 
ing inattresses and bed clothes over a boom. The 
men are chipping and tarring the deck; and the 
boatswain, bare-legged, wildly bearded, a sheath 
knife on his hams, looks like a fine pirate brought 
to menial tasks. 

I have watched this day’s monotonous sky on- 
wards from the dawn. We are in the neighbour-. 
hood of the Hesperides. For some early hours of 
the morning it was grey. But the grey roof soon 
broke with the incumbent weight of light, letting 
sunshine through narrow fractures to the sea, far 
out. There were partitions of thin gold in the dim 
hall. The moving floor was patterned in day and 
night. The low ceiling was fused where the day 
poured through, became a candent vapour, vola- . 
tilised. We had over us before breakfast the ulti- 
mate blue, where a few cirrus clouds showed its 
~ great height. 

Then it was August. The sea ran in broad: pee 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 85 


mounds, blue-black and vitreous, which hardly 
moved our bulk. In the afternoon, the ocean, a 
short distance from the ship, grew filmed and 
opaque, a milky blue shot with purple shadows. Its 
surface, though heaving, was smooth and flawless. 
No light entered its deeps, but the radiant heat was 
mirrored on it as on the pallor of fluid lava. The 
water ploughed up by the bows did not break, but 
rolled over viscidly. The sun dropped behind the 
sea about a point west of our course. Night was 
near. Yet still the high dome with its circular floor 
the sea was magically illuminated, as by the proxim- | 
ity of a wonderful presence. We, solitary and priv- 
ileged in the theatre, waited expectant. ‘The doors 
of glory were somewhere ajar. The western wall 
_ was clear, shining and empty, enclosed by a pros- 
cenium of amber flames. In the north-east, astern 
of us, were some high fair-weather clouds, like a 
- faint host of little cherubs, and,from their superior 
galleries they watched a light invisible to us; it 
made their faces bright. Beneath them the glazed 
sea was coral pink. Even our own prosaic iron gear 
was sublimated; our ship became lustrous and 
_ strange. We were the Argonauts, and our world 
was bright with the veritable self-radiance of a 
world of romance where the things that would hap- 
pen were undreamed of, and we watched for them 
from our argosy’s side, calm and expectant; my 
fellows were transfigured, looked huge, were rosy 
and awful, immortals in that light no mortal is 
given to see. , 

Now had been given me fellowship with the ship 


86 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


and her men; we were one body. I had been ab- 
sorbed by our enterprise. For a long while our 
steamer was a harsh and foreign thing to me, un- 
friendly to the eye, difficult to understand. But 
now she had become intelligible and proper. She 
and her men were all my world, and I could find my 
way about that world in the dark. Getting used to a 
ship has the process of the growth of a lasting 
friendship. Chance begins it. You regard your 
luck askance, as you accept a new acquaintance 
with no joy, to make the best of him. But present- 
ly, to put the matter at its lowest, you arrive at an 
understanding. You have learned your friend’s 
worth. Familiarity would breed contempt only in 
the mouse-hearted. You never‘have to account him 
afresh, or he is no comrade; there can be no sur- 
prises again, no encounters with a stranger in him. 
His value, at the least reckoning, is that you know 
his value. Any hour of the day or night you can 
guess with assurance where his mind would be 
found. And here my “Capella” has no strange 
doors and startling declivities and traps for me any 
more. I know her. She is not exactly all she should 
be, but I apprehend exactly what she is. If I hurt 
myself against her it is my own fault. She is as 
familiar to me as home now. I should resent any 
alteration. Having learned to know her faults I 
like her as she is; the trestle bridge with its sagging 
hand-ropes and wobbling stanchions (look out, you, 
when she rolls) which crosses the main deck aft on 
the port side from the amidships section, where I 
live, to the poop, where the Doctor lives. The two 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 87 


little streets of three doors each, to port and star- 
board of her amidships, the doors that open out un- 
der the shade of the boat deck to sea. There, amid- 
ships also, are the Chief’s room and the galley, 
the engineers’ messroom, and the engine-room en- 
trance; but these last do not open overside, but look 
aft, from a connecting alley which runs across the 
ship to join the side alleyways. Forward of these 
cabins is the engine-room casing, where the ’mid- 
ship deck broadens, but is cumbered with bunker 
hatches (mind your feet, at night, there) ; and be- 
yond, again, is the chart-room, and over the chart- 
room the bridge and the wheel-house, from which is 
a sheer long drop to the main deck foreward. At 
the finish of that deck is an iron wall, with the en- 
trance to the mysterious forecastle in its centre; and 
over that is the uplifted head of our world watch- 
ing our course, a bleak windswept place of rails, 
cable chains, and windlass. The poop has a timber 
deck, and there in fine weather the deck chairs are. 
The poop is a place needing exact navigation at 
night. Long boxes enclosing the rudder chains are 
on either side of it. In the centre is the saloon sky- 
light, the companion, the steward’s ice chest, and 
the hand-steering gear. Also there are two boats. 
I gained my night knowledge of the poop deck by 
assault, and retained my gains with sticking plaster. 
I am really proud of the privilege which has been 
given me to roam now this rolling shadow at night, 
this little dark cloud blowing between the stars and 
the deep, the unseen abyss below as with its pro- 
found reverberations, and the height above with its 


88 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


scattered lights as remote as the sounds in the deeps. 
With calm faith in our swaying shadow I place my 
feet where nothing shows, sure that my angel will 
bear me up. I put out my hands and a support 
comes to them; the pitfalls have ladders for me, and 
by touching at some places in the black shadow, as 
by magic, a lighted and comfortable room at once 
materialises for my rest in the void. 

I think I liked her better as a formless shadow 
after sundown. Whether it was then a noise in my 
head, my tranquil thoughts murmuring in their 
sleep, or whether the sound I heard was the deep 
humming of the world’s speed, I don’t know; what- 
ever it was, it was the only sound. Our mainmast- 
head light was but a nearer star of the host. I was 
not surprised to see one of the stars so close. I was 
within the luminous porch of the Milky Way. 

It was midnight. In that silence, where I was 
alone in space, adrift on a night cloud in the con- 
stellations, the stars were really my familiars; once, 
when in London, though they had been named to 
me and were constant there, they were far in the 
place to which one lifts one’s eyes from the dust and 
traffic, nothing to do with London and with me. 
But now there was no more dust and traffic. I was 
among them at last. Splendid Orion was near and 
vast in his hunting. The Pleiades no longer dim- 
mered on the very limit of vision, but were separate 
points of delicate light. The night moved with dia- 
mond fire. 

I was so far absent from the body that a human ~ 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 89 


voice beside me was like a surprising concussion 
with something invisible in space. ‘Turning, there 
was the glow of Sandy’s pipe. Sandy is an elderly 
man, and an engineer. He was leaning over the 
rail, cooling after his watch below. ‘The magic of 
the star shine had got into his mind too. He began 
with guesses about the things which are not known, 
parrying doubt with, “Ah—but it’s hard to say; 
there are things *s and, “you bright young 
fellers don’t know everything”; and, “somebody 
told me a queer thing now.” 

“There was a bright young feller, same as your- 
self, and he was first mate of the ‘Abertawe,’ out 
of Cardiff. Jack Driscoll was his name. It was a 
funny thing happened to him. I heard about it 
afterwards. 

“All the girls thought Jack Driscoll was so nice. 
One of the girls was his owner’s daughter, and she 
was the best of the bunch, anyway, for she was an 
only child, and her father would have given her the 
earth. He was a good owner, was her father, as 
things go in Cardiff. Do you know Cardiff? Well, 
a little goes a long way on the Welsh coast. Jack 
was a smart sailor, with the first chance of the next 
new boat, if he watched out. I reckon Jack was a 
fool. Why, he needn’t have gone to sea any more. 
But what did he do? 

“Jack was one of them fellers who think if they 
put a gold-laced cap saucy over one ear, and laugh 
with the eyes, they can whistle up a duchess. And 
I daresay Jack could in summer, in his white suity 
when he’d just shaved. He was a bit of all right was 





90 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


Jack. He was a proper tall lad, and the way he 
carried himself— It was a treat to see him move 
about a ship. His black hair was like one of the big 
fiddler chap’s, and his smile would take in one of 
his pals. 

“Well, it was happy days for Jack. He got good 
things to come to him. He didn’t have to look for 
em, like me and you. He knew his work, too. He 
was a good sailor. He could get off the mark, at the 
first word, like a bird, and he never left a job while 
there was a loose bit to it. Sometimes when there 
was nothing doing it was pretty rotten, Jack would 
say, to be stuck there in a Welsh tramp with a 
crowd of dagoes, and drink coffee essence and con- 
densed milk out of a pint mug, and never go to a 
music hall only once in six months. Jack reckoned 
it would be fine to be brass-bound always, in one of 
the liners, and have a deck like a skating rink, and 
a lot of lady passengers who wanted a chap like 
him to talk to them. 

“He could tell stories, too, on the quiet, could 
Jack. They were pretty blue, though. Sailor 
stories. ‘They were all about himself in the West 
Coast ports. Do you know the Chili coast? Well, 
it’s mind your eye there, and no half larks. Theyre 
pretty handy with knives out there. But when Jack 
was out for fun you couldn’t stop him. He was 
like all you young chaps. He wouldn’t listen to 
sense. 

“The ‘Abertawe’ went light ship to Barry, one 

®?ip, from Buenos Aires, and Jack saw her snug, 
and told all the men to be at the shipping office early 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 91 


and sober in the morning, because they got in on a 
Sunday, and Jack saw the old man safe on his way 
to Cardiff, and then shaved, and sang while he was 
shaving. He got himself up west-end style, new 
yellow boots and all, and tied his red tie Spanish 
fashion. And he went down the quay, looking for 
anything that was about, and he felt like the best 
man on the Welsh coast. 

“But Barry is a dull place. Do you know Barry? 
Well, it’s a one-eyed God-forsaken town, made out 
of odds and ends stuck down anywhere, all new 
houses, docks, coal tips, and railway sidings, and 
nowhere to go. It’s best to stay aboard, in Barry. 
Jack began to feel like the only bird on a mud-bank. 
He got out of the town, and walked along a road 
till he came to an old woman sitting in the hedge, 
with her back up against a telegraph post. Her 
face was brown and wrinkled, and she had an or- 
ange-coloured handkerchief round her face, and 
tied under her chin. She was smoking a pipe, and 
looking at her blucher boots. As Jack came along, 
she said, “Tell your fortune, pretty gentleman?’ 
Jack laughed, and told her his face was his fortune. 

“ “What do you see when you look in the glass? 
said she. 

“Now that was dead easy to Jack, because he 
knew as well as the girls; and he told her. There 
was none of your silly modesty about Jack. Then 
the old woman laughed; but I reckon Jack thought 
she was only pleased with him, because he madeg 
a point to make the mothers and the grandmothers 
smile, the same as the girls. 


Q2 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


““What do you see in this glass? said she to 
Jack. She was fumbling in her dress, and hauls 
out a mirror like you see in the old-fashion shops, 
a mirror made of silver, and it had a frame of ebony. 
She polished it on her skirt, and gave it to him, and 
told him to pass a bit of silver with the other hand. 
Well, Jack saw sport, and he could always pay for 
that, and he did what she said. But he only saw 
himself in the mirror. 

“ “Hi, said Jack, ‘here, what’s your little game 
now? None of your larks now,’ he said, ‘or Ill ask 
a policeman what he can see in this tin glass of 
yours.’ 

““You and your policeman,’ she said. “Look 
now, my dandy boy, and see more than your 
money’s worth.’ And she rubbed the glass again. 
Then Jack took another look. It was a dull day, 
but that mirror was bright with sunshine. There 
was something funny about that mirror. He saw a 
fine place in it, all cool and white and gold, like you 
see out East. It was a palace, I reckon. There was 
a fountain in the middle, and some girls with not a 
lot on, like some of the Amsterdam postcard girls, 
were lying around, just anyhow. And there was 
Jack’s own self among ’em, and they were laughing 
and talking to him. It was fine. Jack turned his 
head, just like you would do, to see if the real place 
was behind him. But, of course, there was the 
funnels and topmasts of Barry, and the sky looked 
ns rain. I bet it gave him a shock. 

‘*Now you’ve seen what’ll be your luck, honey, 
if you're not careful,’ said the old woman. ‘Mind 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 03 


your eye,’ she said, ‘mind your eye, you with the 
saucy face. What’s more,’ she called after him, 
‘don’t you speak to the girl with the odd eyes in 
Cardiff, though I know you will, and sorry you'll 
be.’ | 

“““Go to the devil,’ said Jack. 

“He was just like all you young chaps. Thought 
she was an artful old shark who’d got his money 
dead easy. That’s what you always think. If you 
don’t understand anything, then there’s nothing in 
it. You call in at the next pub and chatter to the 
barmaid. What happened? Why, the very next 
day the Skipper came back, and told him the new 
boat was near ready, and the owner wanted to see 
him. Jack went, and forgot about everything, ex- 
cept that he was going to be the handsome boy all 
right with the owner’s own daughter to look at him. 
A pretty girl she was.too. I saw her once, holding 
up her skirts off the deck while she looked round. 
The Skipper introduced me. ‘Good morning, Mr. 
Brown,’ she said to me. 

“Coming out of the Great Western Station at 
Cardiff Jack saw a place he’d never noticed before. 
It wasn’t Cardiff style. ‘It’s a new place,’ Jack 
thinks to himself, ‘and a ripping good place it 
looks,’ for he was thirsty, and there was plenty of 
time. ‘It must have been run up since I was here 
last,’ says Jack to himself, ‘though that’s queer, for 
I reckon it’d take years to rig up a dandy show of 
this sort.’ But in he went. . 

“He was surprised, when he got in, and so would 
you have been. It was like the place I saw on the 


94 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


stage at London once. It was in Aladdin, at a 
place in the Mile End Road. You know what those 
things are like, when the curtain goes up. You can 
see a long way, but you can’t see all the way. You 
expect something to happen there. It was full of 
pillars, all white and gold, in a pink light. There 
was a lot of ladies and gentlemen sitting on sofas 
full of cushions, talking, and they were too grand to 
even notice Jack as he stood there looking round for 
a chair. But it took a lot to get on Jack’s nerves. 
There was one girl in a white silk dress, with red 
roses in her golden belt, and she had a white hat 
with red roses in that, and she looked like a summer 
day. Jack was glad to see that the only vacant 
chair was at a table where she sat alone.. Of course, 
over there goes Jack. The place was as quiet as a 
church before the service begins. 'There was only 
a faint whispering. He got to where the girl sat, 
as if she was waiting for him. She looked up and 
smiled at Jack. Jack sat down beside her and said 
what a fine day it was. She had a face the colour 
of moonlight, and her eyes were odd. But there 
wasn’t a girl who could make Jack wonder if his 
tie was straight, in those days, and he began to 
order things, and talk. 

“Once he took a look round, leaning back in his 
chair, feeling pretty large, and he noticed the other 
people were looking at him ariful-like, out of the 
corners of their eyes, as if he was talking too loud. 
But Jack thought he’d jolly well talk as he liked, 
and he’d got just the best girl in that room or any- 
where else. He looked at his watch. It was near 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 95 


twelve o'clock. He had to be at his owner’s by one. 
There was plenty of time. 

“The drink had a funny taste, but it was the best 
liquor he’d ever had. He marked down that place. 
He didn’t know there was a show like that in Car- 
diff. He caught hold of the girl’s hand, which he 
noticed was white, and very cold, and pretended he 
wanted to look at her ring. There was a stone in 
the ring, just like a bit of soda. She asked him to 
try it on his own finger, because the stone changed 
colour then, but Jack couldn’t get the ring off till 
he’d placed her finger to his lips, to moisten the ring. 
He was the boy, was Jack, to see things didn’t 
drag along. When he got the ring on his finger the 
stone was full of red fire. So the time went; but 
he forgot all about time, and the owner, and the 
owner’s daughter, and everything. The girl’s hair 
was scented, too, and it was close to him. 

“Presently he looked up, and saw what he’d never 
noticed before. He could see further into the build- 
ing than ever. ‘There seemed to be a garden be- 
yond, full of sunshine, and all the men and women 
were walking that way, talking loud, and laughing. 
His own girl got up too, and said, ‘Come along, 
Jack Driscoll,’ and he never even wondered how 
she knew his name, nor why her face was like snow 
by moonlight, nor why she smiled like that. 

“No. Not Jack. All he thought was what a 
ripping garden that was, with palms, and marble 
courts, like you see in the Kast. ‘There was music 
far away, two notes and a drum, like you hear in a 
native dance, before the dancers come. It made 


96 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


Jack feel like a millionaire or a lord, able to do any- 
thing, but just then only wanting a good time. 
Then he noticed they were alone in the garden, 
which was full of trees in blossom. All the other 
people had gone. There was only that music. The 
place was very quiet. He could hear water tinkling 
in a fountain, and he reckoned he would stay there 
till closing time. ‘The girl talked to him in whispers, 
and he put his arm around her. I don’t know how 
long he stayed there, but he kept telling the girl she 
was the best girl he’d ever had, and he’d never had 
such a good time in his life. 

“It was funny the way he got out. Jack reckoned 
in there that the world would never come to an end, 
like young fellers do, when they’re enjoying them- 
selves proper. But once he took her ring off his 
finger, to have another look at it. Then he was in 
the street again, looking up at a building which had 
its doors shut, and Jack only thought he was look- 
ing there for a number he wanted. 

“Tt had started to rain. He looked at his watch. 
It was just twelve o’clock. He didn’t know what 
he wanted with an address in that street, so he 
started off in a hurry for his owner’s house, feeling 
pretty stiff, as if he’d been sleeping rough. When 
he got to his owner’s house, he rang the bell. 

“The owner’s daughter came to the door, and 
looked at him like she didn’t know him, and was a 
bit afraid of him. ‘No, thank you,’ she said kindly, 
‘not to-day.’ And shut the door at once. 

“What puzzled Jack was that he didn’t feel sur- 
prised and angry. ‘ He turned and went down those 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 07 


steps again, and down the street, thinking it over. 
He looked back at the house. Yes, that was the 
house all right. And that was Annie all right. 
Well, what the devil was the matter with him? 
There was a public-house at the corner, and he 
stopped there, thinking things over, and staring at 
the window. ‘Then he saw his face in a mirror, 
and shouted so that the barman came and ordered 
him out of that, sharp now. But he kept looking 
at the glass, not believing his eyes. He knew his 
own face again, but only just knew it. His eyes 
were dull and red and gummy, same as those old 
men have who’ve lived too long, and his face was 
puffed and pimpled, and he had a lousy white 
beard.” 


IT 


DrEcEMBER 28. Lat. 39.10 N., long. 16.3 W. 
‘Course, S.W. 14 west. We are nearing the tropics. 
Now the ship has such a complete set of grumblers, 
good fellows who know their work better than any- 
one less than God, that our great distance at sea is 
plain. Our men, casually gathered and speaking 
divers tongues, detached from earth and set afloat 
on a mobile islet to mix on it if they can, have be- 
come one body to deal with the common enemy. 
We are corporate to face each trouble as it meets 
us, and free to explain afterwards how much better 
we should have done under another captain. The 
skipper knows this broad spirit now possesses us, 
and so is contented and blithe, wearing only on deck 
that weary look which is the sober badge of high 


office, as though he were an unfortunate man to 
have us about him, we being what we are, but that 


he would do his best with the fools, seeing we are 
in his charge. 3 
This morning at six, hearing the men at the hose- 
pipes giving the decks their daily wash, I tumbled 
out for a cold tub. This is a simple affair. You 
leave the cabin with a towel about you, stand in a 
clear space, and rotate before the hydrant, to gen-. 
eral cheering. A hot bath on the “Capella” is not so 
easy, because, although there is a bath-room aboard, 


it has become a paint locker. One must descend 
- 98 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 99 


into the engine-room, after warning the engineer on 
duty, who then will have ready a barrel, filled from 
the boilers. The ingenious man will fix a shower 
bath also. This is a perforated meat tin, hanging 
from a grating above the tub, and connected with a 
pump. After a hot bath in the engine-room, where 
the temperature was often well over 120°, that 
shower of cold sea water would strike loud cries 
from any man whose self-control was uncertain. 

This morning was the right prelude to the tropics. 
This was the morning when, if our planet had been 
till then untenanted, a world unconsummated and 
waiting approval, the divine approval would have 
come, and a child would have been born, an im- 
mortal, the offspring of Aurora and the Sea God, 
flame-haired and lusty, with eyes as bright as joy, 
and a rosy body to be kissed from toes to crown. 
The dancing light, and the warm shower suddenly 
born alive in it from one ripe cloud, the golden air, 
the waves of the north-east trades, the seas of the 
world in the first dawn, moving along like a multi- 
tude released to play, their blue passionate and pro- 
found, their crests innocent and dazzling, made me 
think I might hear faint cheering, if I listened in- 
tently. In the west was a steep range of cloudland 
rising from the sea, and against it was inclined the 
flame of a rainbow. There was that rainbow, as 
constant as the pennant hoisted over an uplighted 
occasion. The world’s noble emblem was aloft. I 
demanded of the Skipper if he would run up our 
ensign in reply to it; but he only peered at me 
curiously. 


100 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


The heat increased with the day. We had run 
well down from the bleak apex of the world with its 
nimbus of fogs. Here was the entrance to the place 
where our youthful dreams began. I recognised it. 
Every feature was as we both have seen it from 
afar, across the roofs from our outlook in the arid 
city when the path to it had appeared as hopeless 
to our feet as the path to the moon. This pioneer 
can assure his fellows whose bright illusions grow 
fainter with age that their dreams must be followed 
up, to be reached. 

At midday we began to cast clothes. As to the 
afternoon, of that I remember the less. There was 
the chief’s empty bunk, so much more alluring than 
my own. Into that I climbed, my mind steeled 
against drowsy weakness. I would digest my din- 
ner with a book, eyes sternly alert. 

The “Capella” rocked slowly, a big cradle. My 
body was lax and responsive. ‘There was about us 
the silent emptiness which is far from the centres 
where many men believe it is necessary to get lots of 
things done. ‘The Chief suspired on his settee. The — 
waves were singing to themselves. A ray of light 
laughed in my eyes, playing hide and seek across 
the wisdom of my book. . . . I put the book down. 

As you know, where I had come from we do not 
dare to sleep during daylight without first arguing 
with the conscience, which usually we fail to con- 
vince. This comes of our mental trick which takes a 
pleasure we wholly desire and puts on it a prohibi- 
tive label. Self-indulgence, you understand; soft- 
ening of the character; courage, brothers, do not 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 101 


stumble. The solemn forefinger wags gravely in 
our faces. Before I fell asleep, my habit, born of 
the hard grey weather which makes an Englishman 
hard and prosperous, did come with its admonitory 
forefinger. Remembering that I was secure in a 
sunnier world I cried out with ribald mockery 
across the abyss I had safely crossed, knowing my 
old self could not follow, and shut my eyes happily. 
And also, let me say—sitting up again with an 
urgent afterthought, which I must get rid of be- 
fore I sleep—if this were not a plain narrative of 
travel without any wise asides I would get off the 
“Capella” here to argue that what all you fellows 
want in the place I have luckily left is not more 
self-restraint, in which wan virtue you have long 
shown yourselves to be so proficient that our awards 
for your merit have overcrowded the workhouses, 
but more rollicking self-indulgence and a ruddy 
and bright eyed insistence on the means to it. Look 
at me now in this bunk! Not since I was last in a 
cradle have I felt the world would buoy me up if I 
dared to shut my eyes to affairs while the sun was 
shining. But I am going to try it again now, and 
risk my future. I repeat, I would argue this with 
you, only I want to sleep. ... 

It is worth recording that when I awoke I found 
nothing had happened to me, except benefit. The 
venture can be made safely. Others had kept the 
course for me. The ship had not stopped. Through 
the door I could see a half-naked, blackened, and 
sweating stoker, who had been keeping the fires 
while I slept, and he was getting back his breath 


102 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


in loud sobs. Something had made him sick. These 
stupid and dirty men will drink too much while they 
are attending to the furnaces. They have been 
warned of the danger, of which they take no heed, 
and so they have to suffer. On the poop was the 
second officer, busy in the hot sun with a gang, over- 
hauling a boat. And I found, on enquiry, that a 
man was still at the wheel. So thereafter, while in 
the land of the constant sun, I slept every after- 
noon, and was never a penny the worse. Somehow, 
you know, things went on. I think I shall become 
one of the intelligent leisured class. 

It was within an hour of midnight. ‘The moon 
had set. I was idling amidships about the ship’s 
shadowy structure when I was asked to take charge 
of the bridge till eight bells. The second mate was - 
ill, and the first mate was asleep through overwork. 
The skipper said he would not keep me up there 
long. I had but to call if a light came into view, 
and to keep an eye on the wheelhouse. Ah, but it 
is long since I played at ships, and was a pirate 
captain. I remembered there are dull folk who 
wonder what it feels like to be a king. ‘The kmg 
does not know. Ask the small boy who is surprised 
with an order to hold a horse’s head. I took my 
promotion, mounting the steep ladder to the open 
height in the night. 

I felt then I was more than sundered from my 
kind, I had been taken and placed remotely from 
the comfort of the “Capella’s” isolated community 
also. There was me, and there were the stars. ‘They 
were my nearest neighbours. I stood for you among 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 103 


them alone. When the last man hears but does not 
see the deep waters of this dark sphere in that night 
to which there shall be no morning sun, he shall 
know what was my sensation aloft in the saddle 
of the “Capella”; the only inhabitant of a congealed 
asteroid off the main track in space, with the sun 
diminished to a point through travel, and the Milky 
Way not reached yet; though I could see we were 
approaching its bay of light. An appreciable jour- 
ney had been made. But by the faintness of its 
shine there was a timeless vacancy to be travelled 
still. We should make that faint glow, that con- 
gregation of suns, that archipelago of worlds; 
though not yet. But had we not all the night to 
travel in? The night would be long. We should 
not be disrupted any more by the old day. The final 
morning had passed. I had no doubt the drift of 
the dark lump to which I clung in space, while my 
hair streamed with our speed, would at length reach 
the bright fraternity, no more than a dimmer of 
removed promise though it seemed. 

A bell rang beside me in the night. It was an- 
swered at once from somewhere ahead. Others, 
then, were journeying with me. ‘The void was 
peopled, though the travellers were all invisible; 
and I heard a confident voice call, “Lights are 
burning bright.” The lights were. I could see that. 
But when the profundities are about you, and you 
think you are alone in outer night, that is the kind 
of word to hear. Joyously I shouted into what 
seemed to be boundless nothing, “All Right!’ 


104 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


One dayfall we saw the Canary Islands a great 
distance on the port beam. I do not know which 
day it was. The Hesperides were as blurred as the 
place in the calendar. ‘The days had run together 
into a measureless sense of well-being. We had 
passed-the last of the trivial allotments of time. 
The islands loomed, and I wondered whether that 
land was the hint of something in a past life which 
the memory saw but could not shape. Whatever 
was there it was too long forgotten, That appari- 
tion which a whisper told me was land faded as I 
gazed at it overseas, lazily trying to remember what 
it once meant. It was gone again. It was no mat- 
ter now. Perhaps I was deceiving myself. Per- 
haps I had had no other life. This “Capella,” al- 
ways under the height of a blue dome, always the 
eentre of a circular floor of waters, waters to be 
seen beating against the steep and luminous walls 
encompassing us, though nowhere finding an outlet, 
was all my experience. I could recall only the 
faintest shadows of a past into that limpid present. 
I could see nothing clearly that was not confined 
within the dark faultless line where the sky was in- 
separably annealed to the sea. Here I had been 
always. All I knew was this length of sheltered 
deck, and those doors behind me where I leaned on 
a rail between the stanchions, doors which sheltered 
a few familiars with their clothes on hooks, their 
pipe racks, and photographs of women, a length of 
deck finishing on either hand in two iron ladders, 
the ladder forward, just past the radiation and coal . 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 105 


grit by the engine-room casing, descending to a 
broad walk which led to the forecastle head, that 
bare outlook always at a difference with the horizon; 
and the ladder aft’ going down to another 
broad walk, sticky with new tar, where the bulwarks 
were as high as the breast, and Tinker, the dog, glad 
of a word from you, trotted about the rusty winches 
and around the hatches; and that walk aft finished 
in the door of the alley-way opening upon the 
asylum of the doctor’s cabin, and the saloon, the 
skipper’s sanctum, and the domain of the friendly 
steward. ‘There was the smell of the cargo drawing 
from the ventilators on the deck, when you went 
by their trumpet mouths. ‘There was the warm 
oily gush of air from the engine-room entrance. 
_ And in the saloon alley-way I used to think the 
store of potatoes, right behind, was generating 
gases. (But nobody knows every origin of the 
marine smells.) Well, here were all the things my 
senses apprehended. I could walk round my uni- 
verse in five minutes. And when I had finished L 
could do it again. Here I had been always. Noth- 
ing could be clearer than that. Looking out from 
my immediate circumstances I saw no entrance 
to the place where we were rocking, the place where 
the “Capella” was alone. The walls of the enclosure 
were fiawless. ‘There was not a door through them 
anywhere. There was not a rift in the precision of 
the dark circle about us where one could craw] out 
between the sky and the sea. 

There we indubitably were though, and I dwelt 
constantly on the miracle of that lucky existence. 


106 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


I could not doubt that we were there. Yet how had 
we got there? I leave that to the metaphysicians. 
There we were; and no man who merely trusted his 
experience could explain our presence. There was 
some evidence to my simple mind that such a life 
in such surroundings perchance was the gift of the 
gods, and that we could never get any nearer the 
limits of the world in which we had been placed 
to see what was beyond, could never approach that 
enclosure of blue walls where the distant waves, 
which beat against them, could not get out. Morn- 
ing after morning I watched them, the dark leaping 
shapes of the far rebels, mounting their prison at 
its base, and collapsing, beaten. 

~The seas never changed. They followed us and 
the wind, a living host, the blue of their slopes and 
hollows as deep as ecstasy, their crests white and 
lambent. They were buoyant, they were leisurely, 
they were the right companions of travel. They 
just kept pace with us. They ran after us like 
happy children, as though they had been lagging. 
They came a-beam to turn up to us their shining 
faces, calling to us musically, then dropping behind 
again in silence. When I looked overside into the 
pellucid depths, peering below the surface in long 
forgetfulness, leaving the body and gliding the ~ 
mind in that palpable and hyacinthine air beneath 
us where the sunken foam dimmered in pale clouds, 
I felt myself not afloat but hovering in the midst of 
a hollow sphere filled with light. The blue water 
was only a heavier and a darker air. I had no 
weight there. I was only a quiet thought tinctured 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 107 


with the royal colour of the space wherein I drifted. 

The upper half of the sphere was blue also, but of 
a different blue. The rarer and more volatile ether 
was above us. The sea was its essence and precipi- 
tate. The sea colour was profound and satisfying; 
but the colour of the sky was diffused, as though 
the heaven were an idea which was beyond you, 
which you stood regarding, and azure were it sym- 
bol, and that by concentration you might fathom 
its meaning. But I can report no luck from my 
concentrated efforts on that symbol. The colour 
may have been its own reward. 


Every morning after breakfast the Skipper and 
the Doctor made a visit to the forecastle. Then, 
after the Doctor had carefully searched his dress 
for insects, we spent the day together. We mounted 
the forecastle to begin with, watching the acre of 
dazzling foam which the “Capella’s’” bows broke 
around us. Out of that the flying fish would get up, 
just under us, to go skimming off, flights of silver 
locusts. ‘This reminded the surgeon that we might 
try for albacore and bonito, which would be a 
change from tinned mutton. The Skipper found a 
long fir pole, to which was attached sixty fathoms 
of line, with a large hook which we covered with a 
white rag, lapping a cutting of tin round the shank. 
When this object was dropped over the stern in its 
leaps from wave to wave it bore a distant resem- 
blance to a flying fish. The weight of the trailing 
line, breaking a cord “tell-tale,” frequently gave us 
false alarms and long tiring hauls. But on the sec- 


108 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


ond day the scaffold pole vibrated to some purpose, 
and we knew we were hauling in more than the bait. 
We got aboard a coryphene, the dolphin of the 
sailors. It gave us in its death agony the famous 
display, beautiful, but rather painful to watch, for 
the wonderful hues, as they changed, stayed in the 
eye, and sent to the mind only a message of a crea- 
ture in a violent death struggle. 

The contours of this predatory fish express ex- 
traordinary speed and power, and its armed mouth 
has been upturned by Providence the better to 
catch the flying fish as they drop back to sea after 
an effort to escape from it. But Providence, or 
evolution, had never taught the coryphene that 
there are times when the little flying fish, as it falls 
back exhausted, may be a rag of white shirt and a 
scrap of bright tin ware with a large hook in its de- 
ceptive little belly. So there the dolphin was, glow- 
ing and fading with the hues of faery. Its life really 
illuminating it from within. As its life ebbed, or 
strove convulsively, its colours waned and pulsed. 
It was gold when it came on board, and darkened to 
ultramarine as it thrashed the deck, and its broad 
dorsal fin showed violet eyes. Its body changed to 
a pale metallic green; and then its light went out. 

Now as I look back upon the “Capella” and her 
company as they were in that period of our adven- 
ture when our place was but somewhere in mid- 
ocean between Senegambia and Trinidad, I see us _ 
but indifferently, for we are mellowed in that haze 
in which retrospection just discerns those affairs, 
long since accomplished, that were not altogether 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 109 


wearisome. It is better to go to my log again, for 
there the matter was noted by the stub of a pencil 
at the very time, and when, unless a beautiful mist 
was seen, it had not.the remotest chance of being 
recorded. When I turn to the diary for further 
evidence of those days of blue and gold in the north- 
east trades its faithfulness is seen at once. 

“30 Decr. A grey day. The sun fitful. Wind - 
and seas on the port quarter, and the large follow- 
ing billows occasionally lopping inboard as she 
rolled. The decks therefore are sloppy again. We 
had a sharp reminder at six bells that we are not 
bound to any health resort, as Sandy put it. We 
were told to go aft, where the doctor would give 
each of us five grains of quinine. ‘This is to be a 
daily rite. To encourage the men to take the qui- 
nine it is to be given to them in gin. Being foreign- 
ers, they did not understand the advice about the 
quinine, but they caught the word gin quite well, 
and they were outside the saloon alley-way, a smil- 
ing queue, at the stroke of eleven. I went along to 
see the harsh truth dawn on them. The first man 
was a big German deckhand. He took the glass 
from the doctor. His shy and puzzled smile at this 
unexpected charity from the skipper dissolved in- 
stantly when the quinine got behind it. His eyes 
opened and stared at nothing. To the surprise | of @ 
his fellows he turned violently to the shi e 
rested his hands on it, and spat; spat cogs 
tinuously and with grave deliberation. 

“Distance run since noon yesterday 230 miles. 
Actual knots 9.5. Totol distance 2072 miles. 





110 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


There was not a living thing in sight to-day; not 
even a flying fish. 

“The night is fine and starlit, the Milky Way a 
brilliant arch from east to west, under which we 
are steaming. When Venus rose she was a tiny 
moon, so refulgent that she gave a faint pallor to a 
large area of sky, outlined the coast of a cloud, and 
made a broad shining path on the sea. ‘The moon 
rose after nine, veiled in filmy air, peeping motion- 
less at the edge of a black curtain. 

“The moon later was quite obscured, and the 
steamer ceased to exist except where in my heated 
cabin the smoky oil lamp showed me my dismal 
cubicle. I went in and sat on the mate’s sea chest. 
~The mate was on duty. On, the washstand was 
his mug of cocoa, and on top of the mug two thick 
sandwiches of bread and meat. That food was black 
with cockroaches. The oil lamp stank but gave 
little ight. ‘The engines were throbbing, and out of 
the open door I saw the gleam of the wash, and 
heard its harassing note. I could not read. I 
loathed the idea of getting into the hot bunk and 
lying there, stewing, a clear keen clangour of 
thoughts making sleep impossible. ‘The mate ap- 
peared, drove off the cockroaches cheerfully, ex- 
amined the sandwiches for inconspicuous deer, 
opening each to make sure, and then muffled himself 
with one. My God! I could have killed him with 
these two hands. What right had he to be cheerful? 
But he is such a ginger-headed boy, and to break 
that unconsciously happy smile of his would be sac- 
rilege. Besides, he began to tell me about his sweet- 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 9111 


heart. Her portrait hangs in our cabin. It is an 
enlargement. You pay for the frame, and the 
photographer, overjoyed I suppose, gives you the 
enlargement. I prefer the second engineer’s sweet- 
hearts, who are in colours, and are Dutch picture 
postcards and cuttings from French comic papers; 
and he calls them his recollections of Sundays a 
home. I listened, patient and kind, to the second 
mate’s reminiscences of rapturous evening walks 
under the lamps of Swansea with this girl in the pic- 
ture—no doubt it eased his heart to tell me—till I 
could have howled aloud, lke the dog who hears 
music at night. Then I broke away, and ran to the 
chief’s cabin for sanctuary. 

“The Chief was making an abstract, and was 
searching through his log for ten tons of coal which 
were missing. In the hunt for the lost coal I lost 
myself. I grew excited wherever a thick bush of 
figures promised the hidden quarry; and in an 
hour’s search found the strayed tons in hiding at 
the bottom of a column. They had been left there, 
and not transported into the next. Again the dread 
of that bunk had to be faced and dealt with. I 
stood at the chief’s door, knocking out my pipe, 
looking astern into the night, looking to where 
Ursa-Major, our celestial familiar of home, was low 
down and preparing to leave us altogether to the 
strange and perhaps unlucky gods of other skies. 
O the nights at sea! 

“31 Decr. Wakened with my heart jumping 
because of a devastating sound without. In the 
early morning, Tinker was being thrashed by the 


112 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


Old Man for eating the saloon mats. When at 
11.80 the men congregated amidships with their tins 
for dinner the sun was a near furnace and the 
breeze abalm. The white of the ship is now a glare, 
and the sea foam cannot be looked at. Donkey 
lumbered out of his place where he attends to the 
minor boiler, his face the colour of putty, and held 
to a rail, gazing out with dead eyes overside, gasp- 
ing. He declared he couldn’t stick his job. The 
flying fish are getting up in flights all day long. I 
saw one fish go a distance of about fifty yards in a 
semi-circle, making a bight in the direction of the — 
wind. We caught another large coryphene to-day, 
and had him in steaks for tea. He was much better 
cooked than the last, which had the texture of white 
wool; and to increase our happiness the cook had 
not given us sour bread. At midday we were 17.22 
N. and 33.27 W. 

“T had a lonely evening with the chief. This is 
New Year’s eve. We talked of the East India 
Dock Road, and of much else in London Town. At 
eight bells, when we held up our glasses in the direc- 
tion of Polaris, the moon was bright and the waters 
hushed. Then we took each a hurricane lamp, and 
went about the decks collecting flying fish for 
breakfast, finding a dozen of them. 


“1 Jan. The uplifted splendour of these days per- 
sists; but the splendour sags now a little at mid- 
day with the weight of the heat. The poop deck 
is now sheltered with an awning; and lying there in 
lazy chairs, with a wind following and barely over- 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 113 


taking us, idly watching the shadows of the over- 
head gear move on the bright awning as the ship 
rolls, is to get caught in the toils of the droning 
wake, and to sleep before you know you are a pris- 
oner. The wake itself, in these seas, when the sun 
is on it, a broad road going home straight and white 
over the hills, the road which is not for us, is one of 
the good things of the voyage. Straight beneath 
the rail the wake is an upheaval of gems, sapphires, 
emeralds, and diamonds, always instantly melting 
in the sun, always fusing and fleeting in swift coils 
of malachite and chrysoprase, but never gone. As 
you watch that coloured turmoil it draws your mind 
from your body. You feel your careless gaze 
snatched in the revolving hues speeding astern, and 
your consciousness is instantly unwound from your 
spinning brain, and you are left standing on the 
ship, an empty spool. 

“Under the awning at night, to the Doctor and 
to me, the first mate played his accordion. He is a 
little Welshman, this mate, with a childish nose and 
a brutish moustache, and in his face is blended a 
girlish innocence of large affairs, and the hirsute 
nature of the adult male animal, a nature he relieves 
on the “Capella” with bawdy talk and guffaws. 
He played ‘Come, Birdie, Come,’ and things like 
that, and then told us some Monte Videan stories. 
As they were true stories about himself and other 
young sailors they ought really to be included in a 
faithful diary of a sea voyage, yet as I cannot re- 
produce the Doctor’s antiseptic judgment, of which 

I know nothing but the glow of his pipe in the un- 


114. THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


responding dark at the end of the stories—the last 
titter of the mate had died away—it is better to 
leave this matter alone. 

“3 Jan. The hottest day we have had. Il 
descended at midday to the engines to see Sandy 
at work with his shining giants. Standing on the 
middle platform, while he was shouting his greet- 
ings to me over the uproar, I felt the heat of the 
grating through my boot soles, and shifted. ‘The 
temperature there was 122°. Sandy was but in his 
drawers and a pair of old boots, and the tongues of 
the boots, properly, were hanging out. His noble 
torso was, glistening with moisture, and as I talked, 
energetically vaulting my words above the roar of 
the crank throws in that hot and oleagmous place, 
the perspiration began a sudden drop from my own 
face and hands, and in a copious way which startled 
me. For a time I had some difficulty in breathing, 
as though in a vacuum, but gradually forgot this 
danger of suffocation in the love of the artist Sandy 
showed while offering me the spectacle of ‘his job.’ 
I think I understood him, At first one would see 
no order in that haze of rioting steel. The massive 
metal waves of the shaft were walloping and plung- 
ing in their pits with an astonishing bird-like 
alacrity; about fifteen tons of polished steel were 
moving with swift and somewhat awful desperation. 
The big room shook and hummed with the vigour of 
it. But order came as Sandy talked, and presently 
I found the continuous thunder, that deadening 
bass of the crank throws, seemed to lessen as we 
conversed, sitting together on a tool chest. Our 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 115 


voices easily penetrated it. And listening more at- 
tentively at length I found what Sandy said was 
true, that each tossing and circling part of the 
room-full could be heard contributing its strident 
or profound note to the chorus, and each became 
constant and expected, a singing personality which 
was heard through the others whenever listened for. 
Above all, at regular intervals, a rod rang clear, like 
the bell in Parsifal; yet, curiously enough, Sandy 
declared he could not catch that note, though it 
tolled clear and resonant enough in my ears. The 
skylight was so far above us that we got little day- 
light. Hanging from the gratings in a few places, 
some black iron pots, shaped like kettles, had cot- 
ton rags in their spouts, and were giving us oil flares 
instead. ‘The terrific unremitting energy of the 
ponderous arms, moving thunderously, and still 
with a speed which made tons as aery as flashes of 
light; and Sandy’in the midst of it, quick in noth- 
ing but his eyes, moving about his raging but » 
tethered monsters cock-sure and casual, rubbing 
his hands on a pull of cotton waste, putting his ear 
down to listen attentively at a bearing, his face 
turned from a steel fist which flung violently at his 
head, missed him, and withdrew to shoot at him 
again, gave me the first distinct feeling that our 
enterprise had its purpose powerfully energised 
and cunningly directed. I felt as I watched the 
dance of the eccentrics and the connecting rods that 
our ship was getting along famously. I think I 
detected in Sandy himself a faint contempt for the 
chap at the upper end of the telegraph. I stayed 


116 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


two hours, and then my shirt was as though I had 
been overboard; and ascending a greasy and almost 
perpendicular series of ladders to the upper world, 
I discovered, from the drag of my feet and the 
weight of my body, that I had had just as much of 
an engineer’s watch in the tropics as I could stand. 
There was a burst of cool light. The tumult ceased; 
and again there was the old “Capella” rocking in 
the singing seas, for ever under the tranquil clouds. 
We had stopped again. 

“4 Jan. A moderate north-east wind and sea, 
and a bright morning; but far out a dark cloud 
formed, and drew, and driving towards us, covered 
us presently with a blue-black canopy. The warm 
torrent fell with outrageous violence, and for all we 
could see of our way the “Capella” might have been 
in a dense fog. The mosquito curtains were served 
out to-day, and we amused ourselves draping our 
bunks. Later, the weather cleared. The night 
- was stiflingly hot; and in that reeking bunk, with 
an iron bulkhead separating me from the engine 
room, it was like lying on the shelf of an oven. 
Though wide open on its catch, the door admitted 
no air, but did allow a miserable tap-tapping as the © 
ship rolled. At eleven o’clock a pale face floated in 
the black vacancy of the door, and I could see the 
Doctor peering in to find if I were awake. ‘I say, 
Purser, I can’t sleep. Will you come and have a 
gossip, old dear?) We went aft in our pyjamas, 
the Doctor cleared away bottles and things from 
his settee, and we disembarked from the ‘Capella,’ 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 117 


visiting other and distant stars, returning to our 
own again not before three next morning. 

“5 Jan. We seem to have got to a dead end of 
the trade winds. The heat of the forenoon was 
oppressively humid and dinner was nearly lost 
through it. The cook, a fair and plump Dutchman, 
broke down in the midst of his pans, and was car- 
ried out to find his breath again. This poor chef is 
up at four o'clock every morning coffee making; 
is working in the galley, which is badly ventilated, 
all day, getting two hours’ rest in the early after- 
noon. Then he goes on till the saloon tea is over; 
when he begins to bake bread. He fills in his leisure 
in peeling potatoes. 

“All round the horizon motionless and perma- 
nent storm clouds are banked. Their forms do not 
alter, but their colours change with the hours. They 
seem to encompass us in a circular lake, a range of 
precipitous and intricately piled Alps, high and 
massive. Cleaving those steeps of calamitous rocks 
—for so they looked, and not in the least like vapour 
—are chasms full of night, and the upper slopes and 
summits are lucent in amber and pearl. In the 
south and east the ranges are indigo dark and 
threatening, and the water between us and that 
closed country is opaque and heavy as molten lead. 
Across the peaks of the mountains rest horizontal 
strata of mist. Some petrels were about to-day. 
The evening is cool, with a slight head breeze.” 


After weeks at sea, imprisoned within the walls 


118 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


of the sky, walls which have not opened once to 
admit another vessel to give the assurance of com- 
munion, you begin to doubt your direction and 
destination, and the possibility of change. Only 
the clouds change. The ship is no nearer breaking 
that rigid circle. She cannot escape from her place 
“under the centre of the dome. The most cheering 
assurance I had was the pulse of the steamer, felt 
whenever I rested against her warm body. Pur- 
poseful life was there, at least. Though the day 
may have been brazen, and without a hint of prog- 
ress, and the sea the same empty wilderness, yet 
when most disheartened in the blind and melan- 
choly night I felt under me the beatings, energetic 
and insistent, of her lively heart, some of that vital- 
ity was communicated, and I got sleep as a child 
would in the arms of a strong and wakeful guard- 
ian. ; 
Poised between two profundities—though nearer 
the clouds, cirrus and lofty though they are, than 
the land straight beneath the keel—and with morn- 
ing and night the only variety in the round, the 
days flicker by white and black like a magic lan- 
tern working without a story. Tired of watching 
for the fruits of our enterprise I went to sleep. Old 
Captain Morgan must have lived a dull life, monot- 
onous with adventure. What is the use of travel, I 
asked myself. The stars are as near to London as 
they are to the Spanish main. In their planetary 
journey through the void the passengers at Peck- 
ham see as much as their fellows who peer through 
the windows in Macassar. The sun rises in the east, 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 119 


and the moon is horned; but some of the passengers 
on the mudball, strangely enough, take their tea 
_ without milk. Yet what of that? 

In the chart room some days ago I learned we 
had 3000 fathoms under us. Well; these waves of 
the tropics, curling over such abysmal deeps, look 
much the same as the waves off Land’s End. I 
began to see what I had done. I had changed the 
murk of winter in London for the discomforts of 
the dog days. I had come thousands of miles to 
see the thermometer rise. Where are the Spanish 
Main, the Guianas, and the Brazils? At last I had 
discovered them. I found their true bearings. 
They are in Raleigh’s “Golden City of Manoa,” in 
Burney’s “Buccaneers of America,’ with Drake, 
Humboldt, Bates, and Wallace; and I had left 
them all at home. We borrow the light of an ob- 
servant and imaginative traveller, and see the for- 
eign land bright with his aura; and we think it is 
the country which shines. 

At eight this morning we crossed the equator. 
_ I paid my footing in whisky, and forgot all about 
the equator. Soon after that, idling under the poop 
awning, I picked up the Doctor’s book from his 
vacant chair. I took the essays of Emerson care- 
lessly and read at once—the sage plainly had laid a 
trap for me—‘“Why covet a knowledge of new 
facts? Day and night, a house and garden, a few 
books, a few actions, serve as well as all trades and 
spectacles.” So . At this moment the first mate 
crossed my light, and presently I heard the sound- 





120 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


ing machine whirring, and then stop. There was a 
pause, and then the mate’s unimportant voice, 
“Twenty-five fathoms, sir, grey sand!” 

Emerson went sprawling. I stood up. Twenty- 
five fathoms! ‘Then that grey sand stuck to the 
tallow of the weight was the first of the Brazils. 
The circle of waters was still complete about us, 
but over the bows, at a great distance, were thunder 
clouds and wild lights. The oceanic swell had de- 
creased to a languid and glassy beat, and the water 
had become jade green in colour, shot with tur- 
quoise gleams. ‘The Skipper, himself mterested 
and almost jolly, announced a pound of tobacco to 
the first man who spied the coast. We were near- 
ing it at last. Those far clouds canopied the forests 
of the Amazon. We stood in at slow speed. 

I know those forests. I mean I have often navi- 
gated their obscure waterways, rafting through the 
wilds on a map, in my slippers, at night. Now those 
forests soon were to loom on a veritable skyline. 
I should see them where they stood, their roots in 
the unfrequented floods. I should see Santa Maria 
de Belem, its aerial foliage over its shipping and 
squalor. It was quite near now. I should see 
Santarem and Obydos, and Ita-coatiara; and then, 
turning from the King of Rivers to his tributary, 
the Madeira, follow the Madeira to the San An- 
tonio falls in the heart of the South American con- © 
tinent. We drew over 23 feet, with this “Capella.” 
We were going to try what had never been at- 
tempted before by an ocean steamer. ‘This, too, © 
was pioneering. I also was on an adventure, going 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 121 


_ two thousand miles under those clouds of the equa- 
torial rains, to live for a while in the forests of the 
Orellana. And our vessel’s rigging, so they tell 
me, sometimes shall drag the foliage in showers on 
our decks, and where we anchor at night the crea- 
tures of the jungle will call. 

Our nearness to land stirs up some old dreads in 
our minds also. We discuss those dreads again, 
though with more concern than we did at Swansea. 
Over the bows is now the prelude. We have heard 
many unsettling legends of yellow fever, malaria, 
blackwater fever, dysentery, and beri-beri. The 
mates, looking for land, swear they were fools to 
come a voyage like this. They ought to have known 
better. The Doctor, who does not always. smile 
when he is amused, advises us not to buy a white 
sun umbrella at Para, but a black one; then it will 
do for the funerals. 

“Land O!” That was the Skipper’s own per- 
functory cry. He had saved his pound of tobacco. 

It was two in the afternoon. There was America. 
I rediscovered it with some difficulty. All I could 
_ see was a mere local thickening of the horizon, as 
though the pen which drew the faint line dividing 
the world ahead into an upper and a nether opal- 
escence had run a little freely at one point. That. 
thickening of the horizon was the island of Monjui. 
Soon, though, there was a palpable something 
athwart our course. The skyline heightened into a 
_ bluish barrier, which, as we approached still nearer, 
broke into sections. The chart showed that a series 
of low wooded islands skirted the mainland. Yet 


122 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


it was hard to believe we were approaching land 
again. What showed as land was of too unsubstan- 
tial a quality, too thin and broken a rind on that 
vast area of water to be of any use as a foothold. 
Where luminous sky was behind an island groups 
of diminutive palms showed, as tiny and distinct as 
the forms of mildew under a magnifying glass, 
delicate black pencillings along the foot of the sky- 
wall. Often that hairlike tracery seemed to rest 
upon the sea. The “Capella” continued to stand 
in, till America was more than a frail and tinted 
illusion which sometimes faded the more the eye 
sought it. Presently it cast reflections. The islands 
grew into cobalt layers, with vistas of silver water 
between them, giving them body. The course was 
changed to west, and we cruised along for Atalaia 
point, towards the pilot station. Over the thin and 
futile rind of land which topped the sea—it might 
have undulated on the low swell—ponderous thun- 
der clouds towered, continents of night in the sky, 
with translucent areas dividing them which were 
strangely illuminated from the hither side. Cur- 
tains as black as bitumen draped to the waters from 

great heights. Two of these appalling curtains, — 
trailing over America, were a little withdrawn. We 
could look beyond them to a diminishing array of 
glowing cloud summits, as if we saw there an acci- 
dental revelation of a secret and wonderful region 
with a sun of its own. And all, gigantic clouds, the 
sea, the far and frail coast, were serene and still. 
The air had ceased to breathe. I thought this new 
Jucent world we had found might prove but a lucky 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 123 


dream after all, to be seen but not to be entered, 
and that some noise would presently shatter it and 
wake me. But we came alongside the white pilot 


~ schooner, and the pilot put off in a boat manned 


by such a crowd of grinning, ragged, and cinnamon 
skinned pirates as would have broken the fragile 
wonder of any spell. Ours, though, did not break, 
and I was able to believe we had arrived. At sun- 
set the great clouds were full of explosions of elec- 
tric fire, and there were momentary revelations 
above us of huge impending shapes. We went 
slowly over a lower world obscurely lighted by 
phosphorescent waves. 

It was not easy to make out, before sunrise, what 
it was we had come to. I saw a phantom and in- 
determinate country; but as though we guessed it 
was suspicious and observant, and its stillness a 
device, we moved forward slowly and noiselessly, 
as a thief at an entrance. Low level cliffs were near 
to either beam. ‘The cliffs might have been the 
dense residuum of the night. The night had been 
precipitated from the sky, which was -clearing and 
brightening. Our steamer was between banks of 
these iron shades. 

Suddenly the sunrise ran a long band of glow- 
ing saffron over the shadow to port, and the vague 
summit became remarkable with a parapet of black 
filigree, crowns and fronds of palms and strange 
trees showing in rigid patterns of ebony. A faint 
air then moved from off shore as though under the 
impulse of the pouring light. It was heated and 


124 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


humid, and bore a curious odour, at once foreign 
and familiar, the smell of damp earth, but not of 
the earth I knew, and of vegetation, but of vegeta- 
tion exotic and wild. For a time it puzzled me that . 
I knew the smell; and then I remembered where we 
had met before. It was in the palm house at Kew 
Gardens. At Kew that odour once made a deeper 
impression on me than the extraordinary vegetation 
itself, for as a boy I thought that I inhaled the very 
spirit of the tropics of which it was born. After the 
first minute on the Para River that smell went, and 
I never noticed it again. 

Full day came quickly to show me the reality of 
one of my early visions, and I suppose I may not 
expect many more such minutes as I spent when 
watching from the “Capella’s” bridge the forest 
of the Amazon take shape. It was soon over. The 
morning light brimmed at the forest top, and spilled 
into the river. The channel filled with sunshine. 
There it was then. In the northern cliff I could 
see even the boughs and trunks; they were veins of 
silver in a mass of solid chrysolite. ‘This forest had 
not the rounded and dull verdure of our own woods 
im midsummer, with deep bays of shadow. It was 
a sheer front, uniform, shadowless, and astonish- 
ingly vivid. I thought then the appearance of the 
forest was but a local feature, and so gazed at it for 
what it would show me next. It had nothing else to 
show me. Clumps of palms threw their fronds 
above the forest roof in some places, or a giant 
exogen raised a dome; but that was all. ‘Those 
strong characters in the growth were seen only in 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 125 


passing. They did not change the outlook ahead 
of converging lines of level green heights rising 
directly from a brownish flood. 

Occasionally the river narrowed, or we passed 
close to one wall, and then we could see the texture 
of the forest surface, the microstructure of the cliff, 
though we could never look into it for more than a 
few yards, except where, in some places, habitations 
were thrust into the base of the woods, as in lower 
caverns. An exuberant wealth of forms built up 
that forest which was so featureless from a little 
distance. The numerous palms gave grace and life 
to the facade, for their plumes flung in noble arcs 
from tall and slender columns, or sprayed directly 
from the ground in emerald fountains. ‘The rest 
was inextricable confusion. Vines looped across 
the front of green, binding the forest with cordage, 
and the roots of epiphytes dropped from upper 
boughs, like hanks of twine. 

In some places the river widened into lagoons, 
and we seemed to be in a maze of islands. Canoes 
shot across the waterways, and river schooners, 
shaped very like junks, with high poops and blue 
and red sails, were diminished beneath the verdure, 
betraying the great height of the woods. Because 
of its longitudinal] extension, fining down to a point 
in the distance, the elevation of the forest, when 
uncontrasted, looked much less than it really was. 
The scene was so luminous, still, and voiceless, it 
was so like a radiant mirage, or a vivid remem- 
brance of an emotional dream got from books read 
and read again, that only the unquestionable verity 


126 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


of our iron steamer, present with her smoke and 
prosaic gear, convinced me that what was outside 
us was there. Across a hatch a large butterfly 
hovered and flickered like a flame. Dragon flies 
were suspended invisibly over our awning, jewels 
in shimmering enamels. 

We anchored just before breakfast, and a small 
launch flying a large Brazilian flag was soon fuss- 
ing at our gangway. The Brazilian customs men 
boarded us, and the official who was left in charge 
to overlook the “Capella” while we remained was 
a tall and majestic Latin with dark eyes of such 
nobility and brooding melancholy that it never 
occurred to me that our doctor, who has travelled 
much, was other than a fellow with a dull Anglo- 
Saxon mind when he removed some loose property 
to his cabin and locked his door, before he went 
ashore. So I left my field glasses on the ice-chest; 
and that was the last I saw of them. Yet that 
fellow had such lovely hair, as the ladies would say, 
and his smile and his courtesy were fit for kings. He 
carried a scented pink handkerchief and wore 
patent leather boots. Our surgeon had but a faint 
laugh when these explanations weresmade to him, 
taking my hand fondly, and saying he loved little 
children. 

Para, a flat congestion of white buildings and red 
roofs in the sun, was about a mile beyond our an- 
chorage, over the port bow; and as its name has 
been to me one that had the appeal of the world not 
ours, like Tripoli of Barbary, Macassar, the Mar- 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 127 


quesas, and the Rio Madre de Dios, the agent’s 
launch, as it took us towards the small craft lying 
immediately before the front of that spread of 
houses between the river and the forest, was so mo- 
mentous an occasion that the small talk of the 
dainty Englishmen in linen suits, a gossiping group 
around the agent and the Skipper, hardly came into 
the picture, tomy mind. The launch rudely hustled 
through a cluster of gaily painted native boats, the 
dingiest of them bearing some sonorous name, and 
I landed in Brazil. 

There was an esplanade, shadowed by an avenue 
of mangoes. We crossed that, and went along hot 
narrow streets, by blotched and shabby walls, to 
the office to which our ship was consigned. We met 
a fisherman carrying a large turtle by a flipper. We 
came to a dim cool warehouse. ‘There, some negroes 
and half-breeds were lazily hauling packages in the 
shadows. It had an office railed off where a few 
English clerks, in immaculate white, overlooked a 
staff of natives. The warehouse had a strange and 
memorable odour, evasive, sweet, and pungent, as 
barbaric a note as I found in Para, and I under- 
stood at once I had come to a place where there 
were things I did not know. I felt almost timorous 
and yet compelled when I sniffed at those shadows; 
though what the eye saw in the squalid streets of 
the riverside, where brown folk stood regarding us 
carelessly from openings in the walls, I had thought 
no more than a little interesting. 

What length of time we should have in Belem was 
uncertain, but presently the Skipper, looking most 


128 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


morose, came away from his discussion with the 
agent and*told us, at some length, what he thought 
of people who kept a ship waiting because of a few 
unimportant papers. Then he mumbled, very re- 
luctantly, that we had plenty of time to see all Para. 
The Doctor and I were out of that office before the 
Skipper had time to change his mind. Our captain 
is a very excellent master mariner, but occasionally 
he likes to test the security of his absolute autoc- 
racy, to see if itis still sound. I never knew it when 
it was not; but yet he must, to assure himself of a 
certainty, or to exercise some devilish choler in his 
nature, sometimes beat our poor weak bodies 
against the adamant thing, to see which first will 
break. I will say for him that he is always polite | 
when handing back to us our bruised fragments. 
Here he was giving us a day’s freedom, and one’s 
first city of the tropics in which to spend it; and we 
agreed with him that such a waste of time was al- 
most unbearable, and left hurriedly. 

Outside the office was a small public square where 
grew palms which ran flexible boles, swaying with 
the weight of their crowns, clear above the sur- 
rounding buildings, shadowing them except in one 
place, where the front of a ruinous church showed, 
topped by a crucifix. ‘The church, a white and 
dilapidated structure, was hoary with ficus and 
other plants which grew from ledges and crevices. 
Through the crowns of the palms the sunlight fell 
in dazzling lathes and partitions, chequering the 
stones, An ox-cart stood beneath. 

The Paraenses, passing by at a lazy gait—which 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 120): 5 


I was soon compelled to imitate—in the heat, were 
puzzling folk to one used to the features of a race 
of pure blood, like ourselves. Portuguese, negro, 
and Indian were there, but rarely a true type of 
one. Except where the black was the predominant 
factor the men were impoverished bodies, sallow, 
meagre, and listless; though there were some brown 
and brawny ruffians by the foreshore. But the 
women often were very showy creatures, certainly 
indolent in movement, but not listless, and built in 
notable curves. They were usually of a richer 
colour than their mates, and moved as though their 
blood were of a quicker temper. They had slow 
and insolent eyes. The Indian has given them the 
black hair and brown skin, the negro the figure, and 
Portugal their features and eyes. Of course, the 
ladies of Para society, boasting their straight Por- 
tuguese descent, are not included in this insulting 
description; and I do not think I saw them. Unless, 
indeed, they were the ladies who boldly eyed us in 
the fashionable Para hotel, where we lunched, at a 
great price, off imported potatoes, tinned peas, and 
beef which in England would be sold to a glue fac- 
tory; I mean the women in those Parisian costumes 
erring something on the sides of emphasis, and 
whose remarkable pallor was even a little greenish 
in the throat shadows. 

After lunch some disappointment and irresolu- 
tion crept into our holiday. . . . There had been a 
time—but that was when Para was only in a book; 
that was when its mere printed name was to me a 
token of the tropics. You know the place I mean. 


130 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


You can picture it. Paths that go at noon but a 
little way into the jungle which overshadows an 
isolated community of strange but kindly folk, 
paths that end in a twilight stillness; ardent hues, 
flowers of vanilla, warm rain, a luscious and gener- 
ative earth, fireflies in the scented dusk of gardens; 
and mystery—every outlook disappearing in the 
dark of the unknown. 

Well, here I was, placed by the ordinary moves 
of circumstance in the very place the name of 
which once had been to me like a chord of that music 
none hears but oneself. I stood in Para, outside a 
picture postcard shop. Electric cars were bumping 
down a narrow street. The glitter of a cheap jew- 
eller’s was next to the stationer’s; and on the other 
side was a vendor of American and Parisian boots. 
There have been changes in Para since Bates wrote 
his idylls of the forest. We two travellers, after 
ordering some red earthenware chatties, went to 
find Bates’ village of Nazareth. In 1850 it was a 
mile from the town. It is part of the town now, 
and an electric tram took us there, a tram which 
drove vultures off the line as it bumped along. The 
heat was a serious burden. ‘The many dogs, which 
found energy enough to limp out of the way of 
the car only when at the point of death, were thin 
and diseased, and most unfortunate to our nice 
eyes. The Brazilian men of better quality we 
passed were dressed in black cloth suits, and one 
mocked the equator with a silk hat and yellow 
boots. I set down these things as the tram showed 
them. ‘The evident pride and hauteur, too, of these 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 131 


Latins, was a surprise to one of a stronger race. 
We stopped at a street corner, and this was Naza- 
reth. Bates’ pleasant hamlet is now the place of 
Para’s fashionable homes—pleasant still, though 
the overhead tram cables, and the electric light 
standards which interrupt the avenues of trees, 
place you there, now your own turn comes to look 
for the romance of the tropics, in another century. 
But the villas are in heliotrope, primrose, azure, 
and rose, bowered in extravagant arbours of papaws 
mangoes, bananas, and palms, with shrubberies be- 
neath of feathery mimosas, and cassias with orange 
and crimson blooms. And my last walk ashore was 
in Swansea High Street in the winter rain! From 
Nazareth’s main street the side turnings go down 
to the forest. For, in spite of its quays, its steamers, 
and its electric trams, Para is but built in a larger 
clearing of the wilderness. The jungle stood at the 
bottom of all suburban streets, a definite city wall. 
The spontaneity and savage freedom of the plant 
life in this land of alternate hot sun and warm show- 
ers at last blurred and made insignificant to me the 
men who braved it in silk hats and broadcloth there, 
and the trams, and the jewellers’ shops, for my 
experience of vegetation was got on my knees in a 
London suburb, praying things to come out of the 
cold mud. Here, I began to suspect, they besieged 
us, quick and turbulent, an exhaustible army, ready 
to reconquer the foothold man had hardly won, and 
to obliterate his works. 

We passed through by-ways, where naked brown 
babies played before the doors. We happened upon 


132 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


the cathedral, and went on to the little dock where 
native vessels rested on garbage, the tide being out. 
Vultures pulled at stuff beneath the bilges. The 
crews, more Indian than anything, and men of 
better body than the sallow fellows in the town, 
sprawled on the hot stones of the quays and about 
the decks. ‘There was a huge negress, arms akim- 
bo, a shapeless monument in black indiarubber 
draped in cotton print, who talked loudly with a 
red boneless mouth to two disregarding Indians 
sitting with their backs to a wall. She had a rab- 
bit’s foot, mounted in silver, hanging between her 
dugs. The schooners, ranged in an arcade, were 
rigged for lateen sails, very like Mediterranean 
craft. ‘The forest was a narrow neutral tinted rib- 
bon far beyond. The sky was blue, the texture 
of porcelain. ‘The river was yellow. And I was 
grievously disappointed; yet if you put it to me I 
cannot say why. ‘There was something missing, 
and I don’t know what. There was something I 
could not find; but as it is too intangible a matter 
for me to describe even now, you may Say, if you 
like, that the fault was with me, and not with Para. 
We stood in a shady place, and the doctor, looking 
down at his hand, suddenly struck it. “Let us go,” 
he said. He showed me the corpse of a mosquito. 
“Have you ever seen the yellow fever chap?” the 
Doctor asked. “That is he.” We left. 

Near the agent’s office we met an English ship- 
ping clerk, and he took us into a drink shop, and 
sat us at a marble-topped table having gilded iron 
legs, and called for gin tonics. We began to tell 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 133 


him what we thought of Para. It did not seem 
much of a place. It was neither here nor there. 
He was a pallid fellow with a contemplative 
smile, and with weary eyes and tired movements. 
“I know all that,” he said. “It’s a bit of a hole. 
Stull— You’d be surprised. There’s a lot here 
you don’t see at first. It’s big. All out there—he 
waved his arm west inclusively—it’s a world with 
no light yet. You get lost in it. But youre going 
up. You'll see. ‘The other end of the forest is 
as far from the people in the streets here as London 
is—it’s farther—and they know no more about it. 
I was like you when I first came. I gave the place 
a week, and then reckoned I knew it near enough. 
Now, I’m—well, I’m half afraid of it... not 
afraid of anything I can see ... I don’t know. 
There’s something dam. strange about it. Some- 
thing you never can find out. It’s something that’s 
been here since the beginning, and it’s too big and 
strong for us. It waits its time. I can feel it now. 
Look at those palm trees, outside. Don’t they look 
as if they’re waiting? What are they waiting for? 
You get that feeling here in the afternoon when 
you can’t get air, and the rain clouds are banking 
up round the woods, and nothing moves. ‘Lord,’ 
said a fellow to me when I first came, ‘tell us about 
Peckham. But for the spicy talk about yellow 
fever I’d think I was dead and waiting wide awake 
for the judgment day.’ That’s just the feeling. 
As if something dark was coming and you couldn’t 
move. There the forest is, all round us. Nobody 
knows what’s at the back of it. Men leave Para, 


¥ 


134 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


going up river. We have a drink in here, and they 
go up river, and don’t come back. 

“Down by the square one day I saw an old boy 
in white ducks and a sun helmet having a shindy 
with the sentry at the barracks. ‘The old fellow was 
kicking up a dust. He was English, and I suppose 
he thought the sentry would understand him, if he 
shouted. English and Americans do. 

“You have to get into the road here, when you 
approach the barracks. It’s the custom. The 
sentry always sends you off the pavement. The 
old chap was quite red in the face about it. And 
the things he was saying! Lucky for him the 
soldier didn’t know what he meant. So I went 
over, as he was an Englishman, and told him what 
the sentry wanted. ‘What,’ said the man, ‘walk in 
the road? Not me. Td sooner go back.’ 

“Go back he did, too. I walked with him and 
we got rather pally. Wecame in here. We sat at 
that table in the corner. He said he was Captain 
Davis, of Barry. iver heard of him? He said 
he had brought out a shallow-draught river boat, 
and he was taking her up the Rio Japura. The way 
he talked! Do you know the Japura? Well, it’s 
a deuce of a way from here. But that old captain 
talked—he talked like a child. He was so obstinate 
about it. He was going to take that boat up the 
Japura, and you’d have thought it was above Boul- 
ter’s Lock. Then he began to swear about the 
dagoes. 

“The old chap got quite wild again when he 
thought of that soldier. He was a little man, noth- 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 135 


_ ing of him, and his face was screwed up as if he was 
always annoyed about something. You have to 
_ take things as they come, here, and let it go. But 
this Davis man was an irritable old boy, and most 
of his talk was about money. He said he was 
through with the boat running jobs. No more of 
‘em. It was as bare as boards. Nothing to be made 
at the game, he said. Over his left eye he had a 
funny hairy wart, a sort of knob, and whenever he 
got excited it turned red. I may say he let me pay 
for all the drinks. I reckon he was pretty close 
with his money. 

“He told me he knew a man in Barry who'd got 
a fine pub—a little gold-mine. He said there was 
a stuffed bear at the pub and it brought lots of 
customers. Seemed to think I must know the place. 
He said he was going to try to get an alligator for 
the chap who kept the pub. The alligator could 
stand on its hind legs at the other side of the 
door, with an electric bulb in its mouth, like a lemon. 
That was his fine idea. He reckoned that would 
bring customers. Then old Davis started to fidget 
about. I began to think he wanted to tell me some- 
thing, and I wondered what the deuce it was. I 
thought it was money. It generally is. At last 
he told me. He wanted one of those dried Indian 
heads for that pub. “You know what I mean,’ he 
said. ‘The Indians kill somebody, and make his 
head smaller than a baby’s, and the hair hangs down 
all round.’ 

“Have you ever seen one of those heads? The 
Indians bone ’em, and stuff ’em with spice and 


130 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


gums, and let ’em dry in the sun. They don’t look 
nice. I’ve seen one or two. 

“But I tried to persuade him to let the head 
go. The Government has stopped that business, 
you know. Got a bit too thick. If you ordered a 
head, the Johnnies would just go out and have 
somebody’s napper. 

“I missed old Davis after that. I was trans- 
ferred to Manads, up river. I don’t know what be- 
came of him. It was nearly a year when I came 
back to Para. Our people had had the clearing of 
that boat old Davis brought out, and I found some 
of his papers, still unsettled. I asked about him, in 
a general way, and found he hadn’t arrived. His 
tug had been back twice. When it was here last 
it seemed the native skipper explained Davis went 
ashore, when returning, at a place where they 
touched for rubber. He went into the village and 
didn’t come back. Well, it seems the skipper 
waited. No Davis. So he tootled his whistle and 
went on up stream, because the river was falling, 
and he had some more stations to do in the season. 
He was at the village again in a few days, though, 
and Davis wasn’t there then. The tug captain said 
the village was deserted, and he supposed the old 
chap had gone down river in another boat. But he’s 
not back yet. The boss saidthe fever had got him, 
somewhere. ‘That’s the way things go here. 

“A month ago an American civil engineer 
touched here, and had to wait for a boat for New 
York. He’d been right up country surveying for 
some job or another, Peru way. I went up to his 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 137 


_ hotel with the fellows to see him one evening. He 
_ was on his knees packing his trunks. ‘Say, boys,’ 
he said, sitting on the floor, ‘I brought a whole lot 
of truck from way up, and now it hasn’t got a smile 
for me.’ He offered me his collection of butter- 
flies. Then the Yankee picked up a ball of news- 
paper off the floor, and began to peel it. “This goes 
home,’ he said. ‘Have you seen anything like that? 
I bet you haven't.’ He held out the opened packet 
in his hand, and there was a brown core to it. ‘I 
reckon that is thousands of years old,’ said the 
American. 

“It was a little dried head, no bigger than a 
cricket ball, and about the same colour. Very like 
an Indian’s too. The features were quite plain, 
and there was a tiny wart over the left eye-brow. 
‘I bet you that’s thousands of years old,’ said the 
American. ‘I bet you it isn’t two,’ I said.” 

We returned to the steamer in the late afternoon, 
bringing with us two Brazilian pilots, who were to 
take us as far as Ita-coatiara. We sailed next 
morning for the interior. Para, like all the towns 
on the Amazon, has but one way out of it. There 
is a continent behind Para, but you cannot go that 
way; when you leave the city you must take the 
river. Para stands by the only entrance to what 
is now the greatest region of virgin tropics left in 
the world. Always at anchor off the city’s front 
are at. least a dozen European steamers, most of 
them flying the red ensign. A famous engineering 
contractor, also British, is busy constructing mod- 


138 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


ern wharves there; and Thames tugs and mudhop- 
pers, flying the Brazilian flag, as the law insists, 
but bawling London compliments as they pass your 
ship, help the native schooners with their rakish 
lateen sails, blue and scarlet, to make the anchorage 
brisk and lively. Looking out from the “Capella’s” 
bridge she appeared to be within a lagoon. ‘The 
lake was elliptical, and so large it was a world for 
the eye to range in. It was bound by a low barrier 
of forest, a barrier distant enough to lose colour, 
nature, and significance. Para, white and red, lay 
reflecting the sunset from many facets in the south- 
west, with a cheerful array of superior towers and 
spires. From the ship Para looked big, modern, 
and prosperous; and with those vast rounded clouds 
of the rains assembling and mounting over the 
bright city, and brooding there, impassive and dark, 
but with impending keels lustrous with the burnish 
of copper and steel, and seeing a rainbow cury- 
ing down from one cloud over the city’s white 
front, I, being a new-comer, and with a pardon- 
able feeling of exhilaration which was of my own 
well-being in a new and a wide and radiant place, 
thought of man there as a conqueror who had over- 
come the wilderness, builded him a city, bridled the 
exuberance of a savage land, and directed the sap 
and life, born in a rich soil of ardent sun and rain, 
into the forms useful to him. So I entered the 
chart-room, and looked with a new interest on the 
chart of the place. Then I felt less certain of the 
conqueror and his taming bridle. I saw that this 
lagoon in which the “Capella” showed large and 


a) 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 139 


important was but a point in an immense area of 
tractless islands and meandering waterways, a 
region intricate, and, the chart confessed, little 
known. The coast opposite the city, which I had 
taken for mainland, was the trivial Ihla des Oncas. 
The main channel of the river was beyond that 
island, with the coast of Marajo for the farther 
shore; and Marajo also was but an island, though 
as large as Wales. The north channel of the Ama- 
zon was beyond again, with more islands, about 
which the chart confessed less knowledge. One of 
the pilots was with me; and when I spoke of those 
points in the ultimate Amazons, the alluring names 
on maps you read in England, here they were, at 
Para, just what they are at home, still vague and 
far, journeys thither to be reckoned by time; a 
shrug of the shoulders and a look of amusement; 
two months, Senhor, or perhaps three or four. The 
idea came slowly; but it dawned, something like 
the conception of astronomy’s amplitudes, of the 
remoteness of the beyond of Amazonas, that new 
world I had just entered. 

I crept within the mosquito curtain that night, 
and the still heated dark lay on my mind, the pres- 
sure of an unknown full of dread. I thought of the 
pale shipping clerk and his tired smile, and of 
Captain Davis, his face no bigger than a cricket 
ball, and the same colour, with a wart over his eye; 
and recalled the anxious canvass I had heard made 
for news of sickness up-river. A ship had passed 
outwards that morning, the consul told us, with 
twenty men on board down with fever. 


140 THE SEA* AND THE JUNGLE 


And Thorwaldsen. I forgot to tell you about 
Thorwaldsen. He was a trader, and last rainy 
season he took his vessel up some far backwater, 
beyond Manaos, with his wife and his little daugh- 
ter. News had just come from nowhere to Para 
that his wife had died in childbirth in the wilds, 
and 'Thorwaldsen had been murdered; but nothing 
was known of his daughter. There it was. I did 
not know the Thorwaldsens. But the trader’s little 
girl who might then be alone in the gloom of the 
jungle with savages, helped to keep me awake. And 
the wife, that fair-haired Swede; she was in the 
alien wilderness, beyond all gentlehood, when 
her time came. I could see two mosquitoes doing 
their best to work backwards through the curtain 
mesh. ‘They were after me, the emissaries of the 
unknown, and their pertinacity was astonishing. 


“Jan. 9. The ‘Capella’ left Para at three o’clock 
this morning, and continued up the Para River. 
Daylight found us in a wide brownish stream, with 
the shores low and indistinguishable on either beam. 
When the sun grew hot, the jungle came close in; 
it was often so close that we could see the nests of 
wasps on the trees, like grey shields hanging there. 
Between the Para River and the Amazon the 
waters dissipate into a maze of serpenting ditches. 
In width these channels usually are no more than 
canals, but they were deep enough to float our 
big tramp steamer. They thread a multitude of 
islands, islands overloaded with a massed growth 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 141 


which topped our mast-heads. Our steamer was 
enclosed within resonant chasms, and the noise and 
incongruity of our progress awoke deep protests 
there. 

“The dilated loom of the rains, the cloud shapes 
so continental that they occupied, where they stood 
not so far away, all the space between the earth and 
sky, bulged over the forest at the end of every view. 
The heat was luscious; but then I had nothing to 
do but to look on from a hammock under the awn- 
ing. The foliage which was pressed out over the 
water, not many yards from the hurrying ‘Capella,’ 
had a closeness of texture astonishing, and even 
awful, to one who knew only the thin woods of the 
north. It ascended directly from the water’s edge, 
sometimes out of the water, and we did not often 
see its foundation. There were no shady aisles and 
glades. The sight was stopped on a front of polished 
emerald, a congestion of stiff leaves. The air was 
still. Individual sprays and fronds, projecting from 
the mass in parabolas with flamboyant abandon and 
poise, were as rigid as metallic and enamelled 
shapes. The diversity of forms, and especially the 
number and variety of the palms, so overloaded an 
unseen standing that the parapets of the woods 
occasionally leaned outwards to form an arcade 
above our masts. One should not call this the 
jungle; it was even a soft and benignant Eden. 
This was the forest I really wished to find. Often 
the heavy parapets of the woods were upheld on 
long colonnades of grey palm boles; or the whole 


142 THE SEA*AND THE JUNGLE 


upper structure appeared based on low green 
arches, the pennate fronds of smaller palms flung 
direct from the earth. 

“There was not a sound but the noise of our in- 
truding steamer. Occasionally we brushed a pro- 
jecting spray, or a vine pendent from a cornice. We 
proved the forest then. In some shallow places 
were regiments of aquatic grasses, bearing long 
plumes. There were trees which stood in the water 
on a tangle of straight pallid roots, as though on 
stilts. This up-burst of intense life so seldom 
showed the land to which it was fast, and the side 
rivers and paranas were so many, that I could be- 
lieve the forest afloat, an archipelago of opaque 
green vapours. Our heavy wash swayed and un- 
dulated the aquatic plants and grasses, as though 
disturbing the fringe of those green clouds which 
clung to the water because of their weight in a 
still air. 

“There was seldom a sign of life but the infre- 
quent snowy herons, and those curious brown fowl, 
the ciganas. The sun was flaming on the majestic 
assembly of the storm. The warm air, broken by — 
our steamer, coiled over us in a lazy flux. I did 
not hear the bell calling to meals. We all hung 
over the ‘Capella’s’ side, gaping, like a lot of boys. 

“Sometimes we passed single habitations on the 
water side. Ephemeral huts of palm-leaves were 
forced down by the forest, which overhung them, 
to wade on frail stilts. A canoe would be tied to a 
toy jetty, and on the jetty a sad woman and several 
naked children would stand, with no show of emo- 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 143 


tion, to watch us go by. Behind them was the 
impenetrable foliage. I thought of the precarious 
tenure on earth of these brown folk with some sad- 
ness, especially as the day was going. The easy 
dominance of the wilderness, and man’s intelligent 
morsel of life resisting it, was made plain when we 
came suddenly upon one of his little shacks secreted 
among the aqueous roots of a great tree, cowering, 
as it were, between two of the giant’s toes. Those 
brown babies on the jetties never cheered us. They 
watched us, serious and forlorn. Alongside their 
primitive hut were a few rubber trees, which we 
knew by their scars. Late in the afternoon we 
came to a large cavern in the base of the forest, a 
shadowy place where at last we did see a gathering 
of the folk. A number of little wooden crosses - 
peeped above the floor in the hollow. The sunder- 
ing floods and the forest do not always keep these 
folk from congregation, and the comfort of the last 
communion. 

“There was a question at night as to whether our 
pilots would anchor or not. ‘They decided to go on. 
We did not go the route of Bates, via Breves, but 
took the Parana de Buyassa on our way to the 
Amazon. It was night when we got to the parana, 
and but for the trailing lights, the fairy mooring 
lines of habitations in the woods, and what the 
silent explosions of lightning revealed of great 
heads. of trees, startlingly close and monstrous, as 
though watching us in silent and intent regard, we 
saw nothing of it.” | 


144 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


Once I knew a small boy, and on a summer day 
too much in the past now to be recalled without 
some private emotion, he said to his father, on the 
beach of a popular East Anglian resort, “And 
where is the sea?””, He stood then, for the first time, 
where the sea, by all the promises of pictures and 
poems, should have been breaking on its cold grey 
crags. “The sea?” said the father, in astonishment, 
“why, there it is. Didn’t you know?” 

And that father, being an exact man, there be- 
yond appeal the sea was. And what was it? A 
discoloured wash, of mean limit, which flopped 
wearily on some shabby sands littered with people 
and luncheon papers.’ Such a flat, stupid, and 
leaden disillusion surely never before fell on the up- 
turned, bright and expectant soul of a young 
human, who, I can vouch, began life, like most 
others, believing the noblest of everything. It was 
an ocean which was inferior even to the bathing- 
machines, and could be seen but in division when 
that child, walking along the rank of those boxes 
on wheels, peeped between them. 

You will have noticed with what simple indiffer- 
ence the people who really know what they call the 
truth will shatter an illusion we have long cher- 
ished; though, as we alone see our private dreams, 
those honest folk cannot be blamed for poking their 
feet through fine pictures they did not know were 
there. 

I had a picture of the Amazon, which I had long 
cherished. I was leaning to-day over the bulwarks | 
of the “Capella,” watching the jungle pass. ‘The 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 145 


Doctor was with me. I thought we were still on the 
Para River, and was waiting for our vessel to 
emerge from that stream, as through a narrow 
gate, dramatically, into the broad sunlight of the 
greatest river in the world, the king of rivers, the 
Amazon of my picture. We idly scanned the 
forest with binoculars, having nothing to do, and 
saw some herons, and the ciganas, and once a sloth 
which was hanging to a tree. Para, I felt, was as 
distant as London, The silence, the immobility of 
it all, and the pour of the tropic sun, were just be- 
ginning to be a little subduing. We had come 
already to the wilderness. There was, I thought, 
avery great deal of this forest; and it never varied. 

“We shall be on the Amazon soon,”’ I said hope- 
fully, to the doctor. 

“We have been on it for hours,” he replied. And 
that is how I got there. 

But the Amazon is not seen, any more than is 
the sea, at the first glance. What the eye first 
gathers, is, naturally (for it is but an eye), nothing 
like commensurate with your own image of the 
river. ‘The mind, by suggestive symbols, builds 
something portentous, a vague and tremendous 
idea. What I saw was only a very swift and opaque 
yellow flood, not much broader, it seemed to me, 
than the Thames at Gravesend, and the monoto- 
nous green of the forest. It was all I saw for a 
considerable time. 

I see something different now. It is not easily 
explained merely as a yellow river, with a verdant 
elevation on either hand, and over it a blue sky. 


146 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


It would be difficult to find, except by luck, a word 
which would convey the immensity of the land of 
the Amazons, something of the aloofness and sepa- 
ration of the points of its extremes, with months 
and months of adventure between them. What a 
journey it would be from Ino in Bolivia, on the 
Rio Madre de Dios, to Conception in Colombia, 
on the Rio Putumayo; there is another “Odyssey” 
in a voyage like that. And think of the names of 
those places and rivers! When I take the map of 
South America now, and hold it with the estuary 
of the Amazon as its base, my thoughts are like 
those might be of a lost ant, crawling in and over 
the furrows and ridges of an exposed root as he 
regards all he may of the trunk rising into the 
whole upper cosmos of a spreading oak. The Ama- 
zon then looks to me, properly symbolical, as a 
monstrous tree, and its tributaries, paranas, furos, 
and igarapes, as the great boughs, little boughs, 
and twigs of its ascending and spreading ramifica- 
tions, so minutely dissecting the continent with its 
numberless watercourses that the mind sees that 
dark region as an impenetrable density of green 
and ‘secret leaves; which, literally, when you go 
there, is what you will find. You enter the leaves, 
and vanish. You creep about the region of but 
one of its branches, under a roof of foliage which 
stays the midday shine and lets it through to you 
in the dusk of the interior but as points of distant 
starlight. Occasionally, as we did pon a day, you 
see something like Santarem. ‘There is a break 
and a change in the journey. Moving blindly 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 147 


through the maze of green, there, hanging in the 
clear day at the end of a bough, is a golden fruit. 


“Jan. 10. The torrid morning, tempered by a 
cooling breeze which followed us up river, was soon 
overcast. Disappointingly narrow at first, the 
Amazon broadened later, but not to one’s concep- 
tion of its magnitude. But the greatness of this 
stream, I have already learned, dawns upon you 
in time, and if you sufficiently endure. It persists 
about you, this forest and this river, like the stark 
desolation of the sea. The real width of the river 
is not often seen because of the islands which fringe 
its banks, many of them of considerable size. The 
side channels, or paranas-miris, between the islands 
and the shores, are used in preference to the main 
stream by the native sailing craft, to avoid the 
strength of the current. We had the river to our- 
selves. The ‘Capella’ was taken by the pilots, first 
over to one side and then to the other, dodging the 
set of the stream. The forest has changed. It has 
now a graceless and savage aspect when we are 
close to it. There are not so many palms. At a 
little distance the growth appears a mass of spindly 
oaks and beeches, though with a more vivid and 
lighter green foliage. But when near it shows 
itself alien enough, a front of nameless and con- 
gested leaves. I suppose it would be more than a 
hundred feet in altitude. Sometimes the forest 
stands in the water. At other times a yellow bank 
shows, a narrow strip under the trees, rarely more 
than four feet high, and strewn with the bleaching 


148 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


skeletons of trees and entanglements of vine. There 
is rarely a sign of life. Once this morning a bird 
called in the woods when we were close. Butter- 
flies are continually crossing the ship, and dragon- 
flies and great wasps and hornets are hawking over 
us. The sight of one swallowtail butterfly, a big 
black and yellow fellow, sent the cook insane. The 
insect stayed its noble flight, poised over our hatch, 
and then came down to see what we were. It settled 
on a coil of rope, leisurely pulsing its wings. The 
cook, at the sight of this bold and bright being, 
sprang from the galley, and leaped down to the 
deck with a dish cloth. To our surprise he caught 
the insect, and explained with eagerness how that 
the shattered pattern of colours, which more than 
covered his gross palm, would improve his fire- 
screen in a Rotterdam parlour. 

“Karly in the forenoon sections of the forest 
vanished in grey rain squalls, though elsewhere the 
sun was brilliant. The plane of the dingy yellow 
flood was variegated with transient areas of bright 
sulphur and chocolate. We were hugging the right 
bank, and so saw the mouth of the Xingu as we 
passed. At midday some hills ahead, the Serra de 
Almerim, gave us relief from the dead level of the 
wearying green walls. The sight of those blue 
heights with their flat tops—they were perhaps no 
more than 1000 feet above the forest—curiously 
stimulated the eye and lifted one’s humour, long 
depressed by the everlasting sameness of the pros- 
pect and the heat. Later in the day we passed more 
of the welcome hills, the Serra de Maranuaqua, 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 149 


Velha Pobre, and Serras de Tapaiunaquara and 
Paranaquara, their cones, truncated pyramids, 
knolls and hog backs, ranging contrary to our 
course. Bates says some of them are bare, or cov- 
ered only with a short herbage; but all those I 
examined with a good telescope had forest to the 
summits; though a few of the inferior heights, which 
stood behind the island of Jurupari (the island 
where dreams come at night) were grassy. Those 
cobalt prominences rose like precipitous islands 
from a green sea. We were the only spectators. 
One high range, as we passed, was veiled in a glit- 
tering mesh of rain. The river, after we left 
Jurupari, bent round, and brought the heights 
astern of us. The sun set. 

“The river and the forest are best at sundown. 
The serene level rays discovered the woods. We 
saw trees then distinctly, almost as a surprise. Till 
then the forest had been but a gloom by day. Be- 
hind us was the jungle front. It changed from 
green to gold, a band of light between the river 
and the darkling sky. Some greater trees emerged 
majestically. It was the first time that day we had 
really seen the features of the jungle. It was but 
a momentary revelation. The clouds were reflect- 
ors, throwing amber lights below. In the hills 
astern of us ravines hitherto unsuspected caught 
the transitory glory. The dark heights had many 
polished facets. One range, round-shouldered and 
wooded, I thought resembled the promontories 
about Clovelly, and for a few minutes the Amazon 
had the bright eyes of a friend. Ona ridge of those 


150 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


heights I could see the sky through some of its 
trees. The light quickly gave out, and it was night. 
“We continued cruising along the south shore. 
The usual pulsations of lightning made night inter- _ 
mittent; the forest was not more than 150 feet 
from our vessel, and sitting under the awning the 
trees kept jumping out of the night, startlingly 
near. ‘The night was still and hot, and my cabin 
lamp had attracted myriads of insects through the 
door which had been left open for air. A heap of 
crawlers lay dead on the desk, and the bunk-curtain 
was smothered with grotesque winged shapes, flies, 
cicadas, mantis, phasmas, moths, beetles, and mos- 
quitoes.” 


Next morning found us running along the north 
shore. Parrots were squawking in the woods along- 
side. A large alligator floated close by the ship, 
its Jaws open in menace. At breakfast time a strip — 
of white beach came into view on the opposite coast, 
a place in that world of three colours on which one’s 
tired eyes could alight and rest. That was San- 
tarem. Sharp hills rose immediately behind the 
town. The town is in a saddle of the hills, slipping 
down to the river in terraces of white, chrome, and 
blue houses. The Rio Tapajos, a black water 
tributary and a noble river, enters the main stream 
by Santarem, its dark flood sharply contrasted with 
the tawny Amazon. But the Amazon sweeps right 
across its mouth in a masterful way. ‘There is a — 
definite line dividing black from yellow water, and 
then no more Tapajos. 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 151 


We passed numerous floating islands (Ilhas de 
Caapim) and trees adrift, evidence, the pilots said, 
that the river was rising. These grass islands are 
a feature of the Amazon. They look like lush 
pastures adrift. Some of them are so large it is 
difficult to believe they are really afloat till they 
come alongside. ‘Then, if the river is at al] broken 
by a breeze, the meadow plainly undulates. ‘This 
floating cane and grass grows in the sheltered bays 
and quiet paranas-miris, for though the latter are 
navigable side-channels of the river in the rainy 
season, in the dry they are merely isolated swamps. 
But when the river is in flood the earth is washed 
away from the roots of this marsh growth, and it 
moves off, a flourishing, mobile field, often twenty 
feet in thickness, Such islands, when large, can be 
dangerous to small craft. Small flowers blossom 
on these aquatic fields, which shelter snakes and 
turtles, and sometimes the peixe-boi, the manatee. 

Obydos was in sight in the afternoon, but pres- 
ently we lost it in a violent squall of rain. The 
squall came down like a gun burst, and nearly car- 
ried away the awnings. It was evening before we 
were abreast of that most picturesque town I saw 
on the river. Obydos rests on one of the rare 
Amazon cliffs of rufus clay and sandstone. The 
forest mounts the hill above it, and the scattered 
red roofs of the town show in a surf of foliage. The 
cliffs glowed in cream and cherry tints, with a cas- 
cade of vines falling over them, though not reach- 
ing the shore. The dainty little houses sit high in 
a loop of the cliffs. We left the city behind, with 


152 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


a huge cumulus cloud resting over it, and the eve- 
ning light on all. 

But Obydos and sunsets and rain squalls, and 
the fireflies which flit about the dark ship at night 
in myriads, tiny blue and yellow glow-lamps which 
burn with puzzling inconstancy, as though bemg 
switched on and off, though they help me with this 
narrative, yet candour compels me to tell you that 
they take up more space in this book than they do 
in the land of the Amazon. They were incidental 
and small to us, dominated by the shadowing pres- 
ence of the forest. 

We have been on the river nearly a week. But 
our steamer’s decks, even by day, are deserted 
now. We lean overside no longer looking at this 
strange country. The heat is the most noteworthy 
fact, and drives every one to what little leeward to 
the glare there is. Our cook, who is a salamander 
of a fellow, and has no need to fear the possibilities 
of his future life—though I do not remember he 
ever told me he was really thoughtful for them— 
feeling a little uncomfortable one day when at work 
on our dinner, glanced at his thermometer, and fled 
in terror. It registered 134°. He begged me to 
go in and verify it, and once inside I was 
hardly any time doing that.. We have such days, 
without a breath of air, and two vivid walls of stiil 
jungle, and between them a yellow river serpen- 
tining under the torrid sun, and a silence which is 
like deafness. 

Under the shadow of the awning aft, in his deck 
chair, the Doctor is preparing our defences by 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 153 


- sounding a profound volume on tropical diseases. 
This gives us but little confidence; though, as to our 
surgeon, recently I overheard one fireman to an- 
other, “I tell yer the—doc’s a Man. That’s what 
he is.’ (This is the result of the gin with the 
quinine.) Yet, good man as he is, his book on the 
consequences of the tropics is so large that we fear 
we all cannot escape so many impediments to joy. 
But our health’s guardian is careful we do not 
anticipate anything from peeps into the mysteries. 
He never leaves his big book about, much as some 
of us would like to see the pictures in it, after what 
the donkeyman told us. 

This is how it was. Donkey, in spite of instruc- 
tions, and I know how emphatic the Skipper 
usually is, slept on deck away from his mosquito 
bar a few nights ago. He said at the time that he 
wasn't afraid of them little fanciful biters, or some- 
thing of the kind. I have no doubt the Doctor 
would have had some trouble in making clear to 
Donkey’s understanding exactly what are the links, 
delicate but sure, between mosquitoes and dissolu- 
tion and decay in man. So he showed Donkey a 
picture. I wish I knew what it was—but the sur- 
geon preserves the usual professional reticence in 
the affairs of his patients. For now Donkey 1s 
convinced it is very bad to sleep outside his curtain, 
and when he tries to tell us how unwholesome such 
sleeping can be, just at the point when he gets most 
entertaining his vocabulary wears into holes and 
tatters, You could not conjure that man from his 
curtain now, no, not if you showed him, in a vision, 


154. THE SEA AN THE JUNGLE 


Cardiff, and the fairy lights of all its dock hotels. 
I know that in the Doctor’s book there is a picture 
of a negro who acquired, in a superb way, a wonder- 
ful form of elephantiasis, for the Doctor showed it 
to me once, as a treat, when he thought I was grow- 
ing slack and bored. 

We require now such childish laughter at each 
other’s discomfiture to break the spell of this land 
into which we are sinking deeper. Still the forest 
glides by. It is a shadow on the mind. It stands 
over us, an insistent riddle, every morning when 
I look out from my bunk. I watch it all day, 
drawn against my will; and as day is dying it is 
still there, paramount, enigmatic, silent, its question 
implied in its mere persistence—meeting me again 
on the next day, still with its mute interrogation. 

We have been passing it for nearly a week. It 
should have convinced me by now that it is some- 
thing material. But why should I suppose it is 
that? We have had no chance to examine it, It 
does not look real. It does not remind me of any- 
thing I know of vegetation. When you sight your 
first mountains, a delicate and phantom gleam 
athwart the stars, are you reminded of the sub- 
stance of the hills? I have been watching it for so 
long, this abiding and soundless forest, that now I 
think it is like the sky, intangible, an apparition; 
what the eye sees of the infinite, just as the eye sees 
a blue colour overhead at midday, and the glow of - 
the Milky Way at night. For the mind sees this 
forest better than the eye. ‘The mind is not deceived 
by what merely shows. Wherever the steamer 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 155 


drives the forest recedes, as does the sky at sea; but 
it never leaves us. - 

The jungle gains nothing, and loses nothing, at 
noon. It is only a sombre thought still, as at mid- 
night. It is still, at noon, so obscure and dumb a 
presence that I suspect the sun does not illuminate 
it so much as reveal our steamer in its midst. We 
are revealed instead. The presence sees us advanc- 
ing into its solitudes, a small, busy, and impudent 
intruder. But the forest does not greet, and does 
not resent us. It regards us with the vacancy of 
large composure, with a lofty watchfulness which 
has no need to show its mind. I think it knows our 
fears of its domain. It knows the secret of our fate. 
It makes no sign. The pallid boles of the trees, 
the sentinels by the water with the press of verdure 
behind them, stand, as we pass, like soundless ex- 
clamations. So when we go close in shore I find 
myself listening for a chance whisper, a careless 
betrayal of the secret. There is not a murmur in 
the host; though once a white bird flew yauping 
from a tree, and then it seemed the desolation had 
been surprised into a cry, a prolonged and melan- 
choly admonition. Following that the silence was 
_ deepened, as though an indiscretion were regretted. 
A sustained and angry protest at our presence 
would have been natural; but not that infinite line 
of lofty trees, darkly superior, silently watching 
us pass. | 

One night we anchored off the south shore in 
twenty fathoms, but close under the trees. At day- 


1s6 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


break we stood over to the opposite bank. The 
river here was of great width, the north coast being 
low and indistinct. These tacks across stream look 
so purposeless, in a place where there are no men 
and all the water looks the same. You go over for 
nothing. But this morning, high above the land 
ahead, some specks were seen drifting like frag 
ments of burnt paper, the sport of an idle and 
distant wind. Those drifting dots were urubus, 
the vultures, generally the first sign that a settle- 
ment is near. To come upon a settlement upon the 
Amazons is like landfall at sea. It brings all on 
deck. And there, at last, was Itacoatiara or Serpa. 
From one of the infrequent, low, ferruginous cliffs 
of this river the jungle had been cleared, and on 
that short range of modest, undulating heights 
which displaced the green palisades with soft glow- 
ings of rose, cherry, and orange rock, the sight 
escaped to a disorder of arboured houses, like a 
disarray of little white cubes; Serpa was, in ap- 
pearance, half a basketful of white bricks shot into 
a portico of the forest. 

That morning was no inducement to exertion, 
but when an Indian paddled his canoe alongside 
our anchored steamer the Doctor and the Purser 
got into it, and away. The hot earth would be a 
change from hot iron. Besides, I was eager for my 
first walk in equatorial woods. Our steamer was 
anchored below the town, off a small campo, or 
clearing. ‘The native swashed his canoe into a 
margin of floating plants, which had rounded leaves 
and inflated stalks, like buoys. I looked at them, 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 157 


and indeed at the least thing, as keenly as though 
‘we were now going to land in the moon. Nothing 
should escape me; the colour of the mud, the water 
tepid to my hand, the bronze canoeman in his pair 
of old cotton pants split just where they should 
have been scrupulous, and the weeds and grass. I 
would drain my tropics to the last precious drop. 
I myself was seeing what I had thought others 
lucky to have seen. It was like being born into 
the world as an understanding adult. We got to a 
steep bank of red clay, fissured by the heat, and as 
hard as brickwork. Green and brown lizards 
whisked before us as we broke the quiet. From the 
top of the bank the anchored steamer looked a little 
stranger. Aboard her, and she is a busy village. 
Now she appeared but a mark I did not recognise 
in that reticent solitude. The Amazon was an im- 
mensity of water, a plain of burnished silver, where 
headlands, islands, and lines of cliff were all cut in 
one level mass of emerald veined with white. The. 
canoe going downstream appeared to dissolve in 
candent vapour. Cloudland low down over the 
forest to the south, a far disorder of violet heights, 
waiting to fill the sky at sunset and to shock our 
unimportance then with convulsions of blue flames, 
did not seem more aloof and inaccessible to me than 
our immediate surroundings. 

The clearing was a small bay in the jungle. A 
few statuesque silk-cotton trees, buttressed giants, 
were isolated in its centre. A bunch of dun-coloured 
cattle with twisted horns stood beneath them, 
though the trees gave them no shade, for each grey 


158 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


trunk was as bare of branches for sixty feet of its 
length as a stone column. The wall of the jungle 
was quite near, and as I stood watching it intently, 
I could hear but the throb of my own life. The 
faint sibilation of insects was only as if, in the 
silence, you heard the sharp rays of the sun impinge 
on the earth; your finer ear caught that sound when _ 
you forgot the ring and beat of your body. It was 
something below mere silence. 

We approached the wall to the west, as a path 
went through the harsh swamp herbage that way, 
and entered the jungle. The sun went out almost 
at once. It was cellar cool under the trees. ‘We 
had no idea where the path would lead us. That 
did not matter. No doubt it would be the place 
desired. The Doctor walked ahead, and I could 
just see his helmet, the way was so narrow and 
uncertain. I kept missing the helmet, for every- 
thing in the half-lighted solitude was strange. One 
could not keep an eye on a white hat on one’s first 
equatorial ramble, and only when the quiet was 
heavy enough to be a burden did I look up from a 
puzzling leaf, or some busy ants, to find myself 
alone. There was a feeling that you were being 
watched; but there were no eyes, when you glanced 
round quickly. Do you remember that dream which 
sometimes came when we were children? There 
were, I remember, empty corridors prolonging into 
the shadows of a nameless house where not a sign 
showed of what was there. We went on, and no 
words we could think of when we woke could tell 
what we felt when we looked into those long silent 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 159 


aisles of the house without a name; for we knew 
something was there; but there was no telling what 
the thing would be like when it showed. That is 
your sensation in a first walk in a Brazilian forest. 

I stopped at lianas, and curious foliage, trying to 
trace them to a beginning, but rarely with any suc- 
cess. ‘There were some mantis, which commenced 
to run on a tree while I was examining its bark. 
They were like flakes of the bark. For a moment 
the tree seemed to quiver its hide at my irritating 
touch. Then the Doctor called, and I pushed along 
to find him stooping over a land snail, the size of a 
man’s fist, which rather puzzled him, for it had what 
he called an operculum; that is, a cap such as a 
winkle’s, only in this case it was as large as a crown 
piece. I do not know if it was the operculum, for 
my knowledge of such things is small; but I did feel 
this was the only twelfth birthday which had come 
to me for many years. 

Presently we saw light, as you would from the 
interior of a tunnel. Some beams of sunshine 
slanted from a break in the roof to where a tree had 
fallen, making a bridge for us across an igaripe, a 
stream, that is, large enough to be a way for a 
canoe. The sundered, buttressed roots of the tree 
formed a steep climb to begin with, but the but- 
tresses going straight along the trunk as handrails 
made crossing the bridge an easy matter. Raising 
my hand to a root which was hot in the sun, and 
watching a helicon butterfly, a black and yellow 
fellow, which settled near us, slowly open and shut 
his wings, I jumped, because it felt as though a 


160 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


lighted match had dropped into my sleeve. But I 
couldn’t douse it. It burned in ten places at once. 
It was a first lesson in constant watchfulness in this 
new world. I had placed my hand in a swarm of 
inconspicuous fire ants. ‘The dead tree was alive 
with them, and our passage quickened. We rubbed 
ourselves hysterically, for the Doctor had got some 
too; and there was no professional reserve about 
him that time. 

After crossing the igaripe the character of the 
forest changed. It was now a growth of wild cacao 
trees. Nothing grew beneath them. The floor was 
a black paste, littered with dead sticks. The woods 
were more open, but darker and more dank than 
before. The sooty limbs of the cacao trees grew low, 
and filled the view ahead with a perplexity of leaf- 
less and tortured boughs. ‘They were hung about 
with fruit, pendent lamps lit with a pale greenish © 
light. We saw nothing move there but two delicate 
butterflies, which had transparent wings with 
Opaque crimson spots, such as might have been 
served Titania herself; yet the gloom and black 
ooze, and the eerie globes, with their illusion of light 
hung upon distorted shapes, was more the home of 
the fabulous sucuruja, the serpent which is forty 
feet long. 

A dry stick snapping underfoot had the same 
effect as that crash which resounds for some em- 
barrassing seconds when your umbrella drops in a 
gallery of the British Museum. The impulse was to’ 
apologise to something. We had been so long in 
the twilight, recoiling at nameless objects in the 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 161 


path, a monstrous legume perhaps a yard long and 
coiled like a reptile, seeing things only with a second 
look, that the sudden entrance into a malocal, a 
forest clearing, which, as though it were a reservoir, 
the sun had filled with bright light, was like a plunge 
into a warm, fluid, and lustrous element. 

In the clearing were the huts of an Indian village. 
Only the roofs could be seen, through some planta- 
tions of bananas. Around the clearing, a side of 
which was cut off by a stream, was the overshadow- 
ing green presence. Some chocolate babies, as seri- 
ous as gnomes, looked up as we came into daylight, 
opened their eyes wide, and fled up the path between 
the plantains. 

If I could sing, I would sing the banana. It has 
the loveliest leaf I know. I feel intemperate about 
it, because I came upon it after our passage through 
a wood which could have been underground, a 
tangle of bare roots joining floor and ceiling in lim- 
itless caverns. We stood looking at the plantation 
till our mind was fed with grace and light. The 
plantain jets upwards with a copious stem, and the 
fountain returns in broad rippled pennants, falling 
outwardly, refined to points, when the impulse is 
lost. A world could not be old on which such a 
plant grows. It is sure evidence of earth’s vitality. 
To look at it you would not think that growing is 
a long process, a matter of months and natural diffi- 
culties. The plantain is an instant and joyous an- 
swer to the sun. The midribs of the leaves, power- 
ful but resilient, held aloft in generous arches the 

broad planes of translucent green substance. It is 


162 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


not a fragile and dainty thing, except in colour and 
form. It is lush and solid, though its ascent is so 
aerial, and its form is content to the eye. There is 
no green like that of its leaves, except at sea. The 
stout midribs are sometimes rosy, but the banners 
they hold well above your upturned face are as the 
crest of a wave in the moment of collapse, the day 
showing through its fluid glass. And after the place 
of dead matter and mummied husks in gloom, where 
we had been wandering, this burst of leaves in full 
light was a return to life. 

We continued along the path, in the way of the 
vanished children. Among the bananas were some 
rubber trees, their pale trunks scored with brown 
wounds, and under some of the incisions small tin 
cups adhered, fastened there with clay. In most of 
the cups the collected latex was congealed, for the 
cups were half full of rain-water, which was alive 
with mosquito larve. The path led to the top of 
the river bank. ‘The stream was narrow, but full 
and deep. A number of women and children were 
bathing below, and they looked up stolidly as we 
appeared. Some were negligent on the grass, sun- 
ning themselves. Others were combing their long, 
straight hair over their honey- and snuff-coloured 
bodies. The figures of the women were full, lissom, 
and rounded, and they posed as if they were aware 
that this place was theirs. ‘They were as uncon- 
scious of their grace as animals. They looked round 
and up at us, and one stayed her hand, her comb half 
through the length of her hair, and all gazed in- 
tently at us with faces having no expression but a 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 163 


little surprise; then they turned again to proceed 
with their toilets and their gossip. ‘They looked as 
proper with their brown and satiny limbs and 
bodies, in the secluded and sunny arbour where the 
water ran, framed in exuberant tropical bee: as 
a herd of deer. 

I had never seen primitive man in his native place 
till then. There he was, as at the beginning, and I 
saw with a new respect from what a splendid crea- 
ture we are derived. It was, I am glad to say, to 
cheer the existence of these people that I had put 
money in a church plate at Poplar. Poplar, you 
may have heard, is a parish in civilisation where an 
organised community is able, through its heritage 
of the best of two thousand years of religion, 
science, commerce, and politics, to eke out to a finish 
the lives of its members (warped as they so often 
are by arid dispensations of Providence) with the 
humane Poor Law. The Poor Law is the civilised 
man’s ironic rebuke to a parsimonious Creator. It 
is a jest which will ruin the solemnity of the Judg- 
ment Day. Only the man of long culture could 
think of such a shattering insult to the All Wise 
who made this earth too small for the children He 
continues to send to it, trailing their clouds of 
glory which prove a sad hindrance and get so fouled 
in the fight for standing room on their arrival. But 
these savages of the Brazilian forest know nothing 
of the immortal joke conceived by their cleverer 
brothers. They have all they want. Experience. 
has not taught them to devise such a cosmic mock 
as a Poor Law. How do these poor savages live 


104 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


then, who have not been vouchsafed such light? 
They pluck bananas, I suppose, and eat them, 
swinging in hammocks. They live a purely animal 
existence. More than that, I even hear that should 
you find a child hungry in an Indian village, you 
may be sure all the strong men there are hungry 
too. I was not able to prove that; yet it may be 
true there are people to-day to whom the law that 
the fittest must survive has not yet been helpfully 
revealed. (This is really the Doctor’s fault. I 
should never have thought of Poplar if he had not 
wondered aloud how those bathers under the palms 
managed without a workhouse. ) 

Behind us were the shelters of these settled In- 
dians, the “cabaclos,” as they are called in Brazil 
(literally, copper coloured). Each house was but a 
square roof of the fronds of a species of attalea 
palm, upheld at each corner by poles seven feet 
high. The houses had no sides, but were quite open, 
except that some had a quarter of the interior par- 
titioned off with a screen of leaves. There was a 
rough attempt at a garden about each dwelling, 
with rose bushes and coleas in the midst of gourds 
and patches of maize. The roses were scented, and 
of the single briar kind. We entered one of the 
dwellings, and surprised a young woman within who 
was swinging in a hammock smoking a native pipe 
of red clay through a grass stem. One fine limb, free 
of her cotton gown to the thigh, hung indolently 
over the hammock, the toes touching the earth and 
giving the couch movement. Her black hair, all at 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 165 


first we could see of her head, nearly reached the 
ground. 

A well-grown girl, innocent from head to feet, 
saw us enter, and cried to her mother, who rose in 
the hammock, threw her gown over her leg, smiled 
gravely at us, and alighted, to vanish behind the 
screen with the child, reappearing presently with 
‘the girl neatly attired. Other children came, and 
soon had confidence to examine us closely and criti- 
cally, grave little mortals with eyes which spoke the 
only language I understood there. The men and 
women who gathered stood behind the children, . 
smiling sadly and kindly. They were gentle, un- 
demonstrative, and observant, with features of the 
conventional Indian type. 'The men were spare 
and lithe, of medium height, wearing only shorts 
tied with string below their bronze busts. The wo- 
men were of fuller build, with heavier but more 
cheerful features, and each was dressed in a single 
cotton garment, open above, revealing the breasts. 

The noon shadows of the hut, and the trees, were 
deep as the stains of ink. A tray of mandioca root, 
farinha, was set in the hot sun to dry. Under a 
gourd tree was a heap of turtle shells. A little 
game, a capybara, and a bird lke a crow with a 
brown rump, were hung on the screen. But the 
_most remarkable feature of the house in the forest 
was its pets. A pair of parraquets ran in and out 
the bushes like green mice. My helmet was tipped 
over my eyes, and, looking upwards, there was an 
audience of monkeys in the shadow, quite beside 


166 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


themselves with curiosity. My sudden movement 
sent them off like fireworks. One was a most en- 
gaging little fellow, a jet-black tamarin slightly 
larger than a squirrel. Presently he found courage 
to come closer, with a companion, a brown monkey 
of his own size. As they sat side by side the Doctor 
pointed out that the expressions in the faces of these 
monkeys showed temperaments separating them 
even more widely then they were separated by those 
physical differences which made them species. I 
saw at once, with some pleasure and a little vanity, 
that I might be more nearly related to the friendly 
cabaclos than I am to some people in England. The 
brown chap would be no doubt a master of industry 
on the tree tops, keeping a whole tree to himself, 
and living on nuts which others gathered. You 
could see it in his keen and domineering look, and 
in the quick, casual way he crowded his fellow, who 
always made room for him. I have seen such a face, 
and such manners, in great industrial centres. They 
are the marks of the ablest and best, who get on. 
His hard, eager eyes showed censoriousness, 
cruelty, and acquisitiveness. But his companion, 
with a. sooty and hairless face, and black hair parted 
in the middle of a frail forehead, was a pal of ours, 
and knew it. The brown midget showed angry dis- 
trust of us, knowing what devilry was in his own 
mind. But the black, though more delicate and 
nervous a monkey, his mind being innocent of secret 
plots, had gentleness and faith in his looks, and 
showed a laughable and welcome curiosity in us. 
He made friendly twitterings—not the harsh and 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 167 


menacing chatter of the other—and perfectly self- 
possessed, his pure soul giving him quiethood, ex- 
amined us in a brotherly way with an ebon paw 
_ which was as small and fragile as a black fairy’s. 

A jabiru stork stood on one leg, beak on breast, 
meditating, caring nothing for all that was outside 
its ruminating mind. ‘There were parrots on the 
cross-ties of the roof, on the floor, on the shoulders 
of the women, and in the hands of the children, and 
they were getting an interesting time through the 
monkeys when their faces were not cocked sideways 
at us in a knowing fashion. And what looked like 
a crow was giving bitter and ruthless chase to a 
young agouti, in and out of the bare feet of the com- 
pany. I have never seen creatures so tame. But 
Indian women, as I learned afterwards, have a fine 
gift for winning the confidence of wild things, and 
that afternoon they took hold of the creatures, any- 
how and anywhere, to bring them for our inspec- 
tion, without the captives showing the least alarm 
or anger. There were the dogs, too. But they were 
like all the dogs we saw in Brazil, looking sorry for 
themselves; and they sat about in case they should 
fall if they attempted to stand. Our audience broke 
up suddenly, in an uproar of protests, to chase the 
brown monkey, who was towing a frantic parrot by 
the tail. 

We continued our walk, entering the forest again 
on another path. Here the growth was secondary, 
and the underbush dense on both sides of the trail. 
The voices of the village stopped as we entered the 
shades, and there was no more sound except when 


168 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


a bird scurried away heavily, and again, when some 
cicadas, the “scissors grinders,” suddenly sprang 
an astonishing whirring from a tree. The sound 
was as loud as that of a locomotive letting steam 
escape in a covered station. At a clearing so small 
that the roof of the jungle had been but little 
broken, where a hut stood as though at a well-bot- 
tom sunk in a depth of trees, we turned back. That 
deep well in the trees contained but little light, for 
already it was being choked with vines. The hut 
was of the usual light construction, though its sides 
were of leaves, as well as its roof. I think it was 
the most melancholy dwelling I have ever happened 
on in my wanderings. It did not look as though it 
had been long deserted. There were ashes and a 
broken flesh-pot outside it. The entrance was 
veiled with gross spiders’ webs. On the earth floor 
within were puddles of rain. Round it the forest 
stood, like night in abeyance. The tree tops over- 
hung, silently intent on what man had been doing 
at their feet. A child’s chemise was stretched on a 
thorn, and close by was a small grave, separated by 
little sticks from the secular earth. A dead plant 
was in the centre of the grave, and a crude wooden 
crucifix. 


We had plenty of opportunities for exploring 
Serpa, for the Amazon that rainy season was slow 
in rising, and consequently it would have been un- 
safe for us to venture into the Madeira. The tribu- 
tary would have been full, but it was necessary for 
the waters of the main stream to dam and heighten 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 169 


the flood of its tributary before we could trust our 
draught there. We were nine days at Serpa. The 
Amazon would rise as much as a foot one day, and 
our distance from the shore would increase percep- 
tibly, with strong whirling eddies which made the 
trip ashore more difficult. Then it would fall again. 
Some of the yellow Amazon porpoises showed 
alongside occasionally, and alligators floated about, 
though nothing was seen of them but their snouts. 

Serpa is a small but growing place. It was but a 
missionary settlement of Abacaxis Indians from 
the Madeira in 1759, and was called Itacoatiara. 
When I was there it was renewing its old impor- 
tance, because the Madeira-Mamoré railway under- 
taking had placed a depot a little to the west of the 
village. The Doctor and I spent many memorable 
days in its neighbourhood, butterfly-hunting and 
sauntering. Though mosquitoes, anopeline and 
culex, are as common here as elsewhere in the Bra- 
zils—the lighters which came alongside with cargo 
for us conveyed clouds of them, and they took pos- 
session of every dark nook of the “Capella’’—it is 
noteworthy that Serpa has the reputation, in Ama- 
zonas, of a health resort. JI could find no explana- 
tion of that. There was malaria at Serpa, of 
course; but compared with the really lethal country, 
a country not so different in appearance and cli- 
mate, of the upper Madeira, the salubrity of Serpa 
is perplexing. That virulent form of malaria pe- 
culiar to some tropical localities is a phenomenon 
which medical research has not yet explained. In 
the almost unexplored region of the Rio Madeira 


170 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


the fever is certain to every traveller, though the 
land is largely without inhabitants; and it is almost 
equally certain that it will be of the malignant type. 
Yet at an old settlement like Serpa, where prob- 
ably every inhabitant has had malaria, and every 
mosquito is likely to be a host, the fever is but mild, 
and the traveller may escape it entirely. 

By now you will be asking what Itacoatiara is 
like, that community contentedly lost in the secret 
forest. I am afraid you will not learn, unless, in 
the happy future, you and I select a few friends, a 
few books, and erect some houses of palm leaves to 
protect us from the too vigorous sun there, and so, 
secure from all the really urgent and important 
matters which do not matter a twinkle to the eternal 
stars, noon it far and secure until the time comes 
for the gentle villagers to carry us out and forget 
us; remembering us again when the annual Day 
of the Dead comes round. They will leave some 
comfortable candles above us that night. 

There the earth is a warm and luscious body. 
The lazy paths are cool with groves, and in the mid- 
dle hours of the sun, when only a few butterflies are 
abroad, and the grasshoppers are shrilling in the 
quiet, you swing in a hammock under a thatch—the 
air has been through some tree in blossom—and 
gossip, and drink coffee. Beyond the path of the 
village there is—nobody knows what; not even the 
Royal Geographical Society. One heard of a large 
and mysterious lake a day’s journey inland. No- 
body knew anything about it. Nobody cared. One — 
old man once, when hunting, saw its mirror through 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 171 


the forest’s aisles, and heard the multitude of its 
birds. 

The foreshore of the village is rugged with boul- 
ders richly tinctured with iron oxide, and often hav- 
ing a scoriaceous surface. ‘There we would land, 
and scramble up to a street which ends on the height 
above the river. It is a broad road, with white, 
substantial, one-story houses on either side. The 
dwellings and stores have no windows, but are built 
with open fronts, for ventilation. This is Serpa’s 
main street. It is shaded with avenues of trees. 
In the narrower side turnings the trees meet to forn# 
arcades. One day we saw such an avenue covered 
with yellow, trumpet-shaped blossoms. Ox-carts 
with solid wheels stand in the walks. The sunlight, 
broken in the leaves of the trees, patterned the 
roads with white fire, and so dappled the cattle that 
they were obscure; you saw the oxen only when 
they moved. There is a large square, grass-grown, 
in the centre of the village, where stands the church, 
a white, simple building with an open belfry in 
which the bell hangs plain, bright with verdigris. 
About here the merchants and tradesmen of Serpa 
have their places. The men, hearty and friendly 
souls, walk abroad in clean linen suits and straw 
hats, and their ladies, pallid, slight, but often singu- 
larly beautiful, are dressed as Kuropeans, but with- 
out hats; sometimes, when out walking late in the 
day, a lady would have a scarlet flower in her hair. 

By the foreshore were the cabins, of mud and 
wood, of the negroes. Beyond the town, the roads 
run through the clearings, and end on the forest. 


172 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


In the clearings were the huts, wattle and daub, 
and of leaves, of the settled Indians and half-breeds. 
These were often prettily placed beneath groups of 
graceful palms. It was in the last direction that 
most often we made our way with our butterfly nets 
while other folk were sleeping during the sun’s 
height. 'The humid heat, I suppose, was really a 
trial. One did perspire in an alarming way and 
with the least exertion. ‘The Doctor, who carries 
substance, would have dark patches in his khaki 
uniform, and would wonder, with foreboding, 
whether any more in this life he would catch hold of 
a cold jug which held a straight pint in which ice 
tinkled. But to me the illumination, the heat, the 
odour, and the quiethood of those noons made life a 
great prize. I will say that my comrade, the Doc- 
tor, did much to make it so, with his gentle fun, and 
his wide knowledge of earth-lore. ‘There was so 
much, wherever we went, to keep me on the magic 
‘side of time, and out of its shadow. On the west of 
the town were some huts, with plantations of bana- 
nas, pineapples, papaws, and maize, where blos- 
somed cannas, mimosas, passion-flowers, and where 
_ other unseen blooms, especially after rain, made 
breathing a sensuous pleasure. There we tried to 
intercept the swallow-like flight of big sulphur and 
orange butterflies, though never with success. We 
had more success with the butterflies in the clear- ~ 
ings, Where some new huts stood, beyond the village. 
Over the stagnant pools in those open spaces 
dragon-flies hovered, fellows that moved, when we 
approached, like lines of red light. The butterflies, 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 173 


\ particularly a vermilion beauty with black bars on 
his wings, and a swift flier, used to settle and gem 
the mud about these pools. Other species fre- 
quented the flowering shrubs which had grown over 
the burnt wreckage and stumps of the forest. That 
area was full of insects and birds. ‘There we saw 
daily the Sauba ants, sometimes called the parasol 
ants, in endless processions, each ant holding a piece 
of leaf, the size of a sixpenny bit, over its tiny body. 
Tanagers shot amongst the bushes like blue pro- 
jectiles. We saw a ficus there on one occasion, of 
fair size, with large leathery leaves, which carried a 
colony of remarkable caterpillars, each about seven 
inches long, thick in proportion, blue black in colour 
with yellow stripes, and a coral head, and filaments 
at the latter end. They were pugnacious worms, 
fighting each other desperately when two met on a 
leaf. The larve stripped that tree in a day. We 
were not always sure that the people in this part of 
Serpa were friendly. Mostly they were half- 
breeds, varying mixtures of Indian and negro, and 
no doubt very superstitious. The rodent’s foot was 
commonly worn by the women, who, if we took no- 
tice of their children, sometimes would spit, to avert 
the evil eye. But when the thunder clouds banked 
close, and the air, being still, became loaded with the 
scent of the wood fires of the villagers, promising 
rain, we would enter a hut, and then always found " 
we were welcome. SG Ae 

Even when kept to the ship for any reason this 
country offered constant new things to keep our 
thoughts moving. A regatao, the river pedlar, 


174. THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


would bring his roomy montario, the gipsy van 
of the river, his family aboard—the wife, the grand- 
mother, and the sad, shy, little children—and offer 
us fruits, and perhaps his monkey and parrots. 
Gradually the “Capella” added to her company. 
The Chief bought a parrot which had many Indian 
and Portuguese phrases. It tried to climb a fun- 
nel guy, in escaping the curiosity of our terrier, 
and fell into the river. We fished her out with a 
bucket. The vampire bats came aboard every night. 
They were not very terrible creatures to look at; 
but we discovered they frequented the forecastle for 
no good purpose. Again, stories filtered through 
to us of sickness on the Madeira, and abruptly they 
gave the palms and the sunsets a new light. One 
man was brought in from beyond and died of beri- 
beri. This shook the nerves of one of our Brazilian 
pilots, and he refused to go beyond where we were. 
As for me, there at Serpa the “Capella” was at 
anchor, and we were not near the Madeira, and 
seemed never likely to go. I watched the sunsets. 
The brief, cool evenings prompted me (fever in 
the future or not) to praise and grace. Crickets 
chirped everywhere on the ship then, and the air 
was full of the sparks of fireflies. You could smell 
this good earth. | 

There was one sunset when the overspreading of 
violet clouds would have shut out the day quite, 
but that the canopy was not closely adjusted to the 
low barrier of forest to the westward. ‘Through that 
narrow chink a yellow light streamed, and traced 
shapes on the lurid walls and roof which narrowly 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 175 


enclosed us. This was the beginning of the most 
alarming of our daily electrical storms. There was 
no wind. Serpa and all the coast facing that rift 
where the light entered our prison, stood prominent 
and strange, and surprised us as much as if we had 
not looked in that direction till then. The curtain 
dropped behind the forest, and all light was shut 
out. We could not see across the ship. Knowing 
how strong and bright could be the electrical dis- 
charges (though they were rarely accompanied by 
thunder) when not heralded in so portentous a way, 
we waited with some anxiety for this display to 
begin. It began over the trees behind Serpa. Blue 
fire flickered low down, and was quickly doused. 
Then a crack of light sprang across the inverted 
black bowl from east to west in three quick move- 
ments. Its instant ramifications fractured all the 
roof in a network of dazzling blue lines. The retic- 
ulations of light were fleeting, but never gone. 
Night contracted and expanded, and the sharp 
sounds, which were not like thunder, might have 
been the tumbling flinders of night’s roof. We saw 
not only the river, and the shapes of the trees and 
the village, as in wavering daylight, but their 
colours. One flash sheeted the heavens, and its over- 
bright glare extinguished everything. It came with 
an explosion, like the firing of a great gun close to 
our ears, and for a time we thought the ship was 
struck. In this effort the storm exhausted itself, 


The day before we left for the Madeira we took 
aboard sixty head of cattle. They were wild things, 


176 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


which had been collected in the campo with great 
difficulty, and driven into lighters. A rope was 
dropped over the horns of each beast: this was 
attached to a crane hook, the winch was started, 
and up the poor wretch came, all its weight on its 
horns, bumping inertly against the ship’s side in its 
passage, like a bale, and was then dumped in a heap 
on deck. This treatment seemed to subdue it. Each 
quietly submitted to a halter. Several lost horns, 
and one hurt its leg, and had to be dragged to its 
place. But, to our great jJoy—we were watching 
the scene from the bridge—the Brazilian herdsmen 
on the lighter shouted an anxious warning to their | 
fellows on our deck as a small black heifer, a pot- 
bellied Jump with a stretched neck, rotated in her 
unusual efforts to free her horns. She even bel- 
lowed. She bumped heavily against the ship’s side, 
and tried desperately to find her feet. She was, and 
I offered up thanks for this benefit, most plain- 
ly an implacable rebel. The cattlemen, as punish- 
ment for the trouble she had given them ashore, 
kept her dangling over the deck, and one got level 
with her face and mocked her, slapping her nose. 
She actually defied him, though she was quite help- 
less, with some minatory sounds. She was no cow. 
She was insurrection, she was the hate for tyrants 
incarnated. They dropped her. She was up and 
away like a cat, straight for the winchman, and tried 
to get the winch out of her path, bellowing as she 
worked. She put everybody on that deck in the 
shrouds or on the forecastle head as she trotted 
round, with her tail up, looking for brutes to put 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 177 


them to death. None of the cows (of course) 
helped her. By a trick she was caught, and her 
horns were lashed down to a ring bolt in a hatch 
coaming. Then she tried to kick all who passed. If 
the rest of the cattle had been like her none would 
have suffered. Alas! ‘They were probably all 
scientific evolutionists, content to wait for men to 
become kindly apple-lovers by slow and natural up- 
lift; and gravely deprecated the action of the heifer, 
from which, as peaceful cows, they disassociated 
themselves. 

The Indian says that if he eats a morsel of tiger 
he becomes fierce and strong. I have not the faith 
of the Indian, or I would have begged the heart of 
that heifer, and of it I would have brewed gallons 
of precious liquor, and brought it home in jars for 
incomparable gifts to the meek at heart who always 
do what the herdsmen tell them. The Doctor and I 
made a pet of that black cow, to the extent of seeing 
she got her rations regularly. It was no joke wad- 
ing through manure among a press of nervous ani- 
mals on a ship’s deck in the tropics, in order to see 
that a brave creature was justly dealt with; par- 
ticularly as she swore violently whenever she saw 
us, looking up from her tightly tethered head with 
eyes full of unabated fury, and tried to get at us on 
the hatch above her, bound though she was. Whata 
heart! For her head was fixed immovably, unlike 
the others; yet, till we arrived at Porto Velho she 
kept her fierce spirit, often kicking over her water 
bucket with her forefeet. Curse their charity! 

With two new pilots, we up-anchored next morn- 


178 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


ing; and full of cattle, flies, and new odours, and a 
gang of cattlemen who at least appeared villainous, 
and carried long knives, the “Capella” continued 
up stream for the Madeira. The cattle were 
sheltered, as far as possible, with awnings impro- 
vised from spare canvas, and their fodder was bales 
of American hay. The Skipper did his best to 
meliorate the harsh native methods with dumb 
things. 

And now it seems time to explain. why we are 
bound for the centre of the American continent, 
where the unexplored jungle still persists, and dis- 
ease or death, so the legends tell us, come to all 
white men who stay there for but a few months. If 
you will get your map of the Brazils, begin from 
Para, and cruise along the Amazon to the Madeira 
River—you turn south just before Manads—when 
you have reached Santo Antonio on the tributary 
stream you have traversed the ultimate wilderness 
of a continent, and stand on the threshold of Bo- 
livia, almost under the shadow of the Andes. If 
you find any pleasure in maps, flying in shoes of 
that kind when affairs pursue you too urgently 
(and I suppose you do, or you would not be so far 
into this narrative), you will hardly thank me when 
I tell you it is possible for an ocean steamer exceed- 
ing 23 feet in draught to make such a journey, and 
so break the romance of the obscure place at the end 
of it. But it must be said. Even one who travels 
for fun should keep to the truth in the matter of a 
ship’s draught. As a reasonable being you would 
prefer to believe the map; and that. clearly shows 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 179 


the only way there (when the chance comes for you 
to take it) must be by canoe, a long and arduous 
journey to a seclusion remote, and so the more 
deeply desired. It certainly hurts our faith in a 
favourite chart to find that its well-defined seaboard 
is no barrier to modern traffic, but that, journeying 
over those pink and yellow inland areas, which 
should have no traffic with great ships, a large cargo 
steamer, full of Welsh coal, can come to an anchor- 
age, still with many fathoms under her, at a point 
where the cartographer, for lack of place-names and 
other humane symbols, has set the word Forest, with 
the letters spread widely to the full extent of his 
ignorance, and so promised us sanctuary in plenty. 
I suppose that in a few years those remote wilds, 
somehow cleared of Indians, jungle, and malaria— 
though I do not see how all this can be done—will 
have no further interest for us, because it will pos- 
sess many of the common disadvantages of civilisa- 
tion’s benefits: it will be a point on a regular route 
of commerce. I am really sorry for you; but in the 
sad and cruel code of the sailor I can only reply as 
Jack did when he got the sole rag of beef in the 
hash, “Blow you, Bill. I’m all right.” I had the 
fortune to go when the route was still much as it 
was in the first chapter of Genesis. “But after all,” 
you question me, hopeful yet, “nothing can be done 
with 5000 tons of Welsh cargo in a jungle.” 
People with the nose for dollars can do wonders. 
It would be unwise to back such a doughty oppo- 
nent as the pristine jungle with its malaria against 
people who smell money there. In the early ’sev- 


180 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


enties there was a man with one idea, Colonel 
George Church. His idea was to give to Bolivia, 
which the Andes shuts out from the Pacific, and two 
thousand miles of virgin forest from the Atlantic, a 
door communicating with the outside world. He 
said, for he was an enthusiast, that Bolivia is the 
richest country in the world. The mines of Potosi 
are in Bolivia. Its mountains rise from fertile trop- 
ical plains to Arctic altitudes. The rubber tree 
grows below, and a climate for barley is found in a 
few days’ journey towards the sky. But the riches 
of Bolivia are locked up. Small parcels of precious 
goods may be got out over the Andean barrier, on 
mule back; or they may dribble in a thin stream 
down the Beni, Mamoré, and Madre de Dios rivers ~ 
—rivers which unite not far from the Brazilian 
boundary to form the Rio Madeira. The Beni is a 
very great and deep river which has a course of 1500 
miles before it contributes its volume to the Ma- 
deira. The Rio Madeira, a broad and deep stream 
in the rainy season, reaches the Amazon in another 
1100 miles. But between Guajara-Merim and San 


Antonio the Madeira comes down a terrace 250 
miles in length of nineteen dangerous cataracts. 


The Bolivian rubber collectors shoot those rapids in 
their batelaces, large vessels carrying sometimes ten 
tons of produce and a crew of a dozen men, when 
the river is full. Many are overturned, and the 
produce and the men are lost. The Madeira trav- 
erses a country notorious even on the Amazon for 
its fever, and quite unexplored a mile inland any- 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 181 


where on its banks; the rubber hunters, too, have to 
reckon with wandering tribes of hostile Indians. 

The country is like that to-day. Then judge its 
value for a railway route in the early seventies. But 
Colonel Church was a New Englander, and again 
he was a visionary, so therefore most energetic and 
compelling; he soon persuaded the practical busi- 
ness folk, who seldom know much, and are at the 
mercy of every eloquent dreamer, to part with a lot 
of money to buy his Bolivian dream. We do really 
find the Colonel, on 1st November 1871, solemnly 
cutting the first sod of a railway in the presence of 
a party of Indians, with the wild about him which 
had persisted from the beginning of things. What 
the Indians thought of it is not recorded. Anyhow, 
they seem to have humoured the infatuated man 
_who stopped to cut a square of grass in the land of 
the Parentintins, the men who go stark naked, and 
make musical instruments out of the shin bones of 
their victims. 

An English company of engineering contractors 
was given the job of building the line, and a small 
schooner, the “Silver Spray,’ went up to San An- 
tonio with materials in 1872. Her captain, and some 
of her officers, died on the way. A year later the 
contractors confessed utter defeat. The jungle had 
won. They declared that “the country was a char- 
nel-house, their men dying like flies, that the road 
ran through an inhospitable wilderness of alternat- 
ing swamp and porphyry ridges, and that, with the 
command of all the capital in the world, and half its 


182 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


population, it would be impossible to build the 
road.” (There is a quality of bitterness in their 
vehement hate which I recognise. I heard the same 
emotional chord expressed concerning that land, 
though not because of failure there, only two years 
ago.) 

But the Bank of England held a large sum in 
trust for the pursuance of this enterprise, and after 
the lawyers had attended to the trust money in long 
debate in Chancery, there was yet enough of it left 
to justify the indefatigable colonel in beginning the 
railway again. ‘That was in 1876. Messrs. Collins, 
of Philadelphia, obtained the contract. The road, 
of metre gauge, was to be built in three years. The 
matter excited the United States into a wonderful 
attention. ‘The press there went slightly delirious, 
and the excited Hiagle was advised that “two Phila- 
delphians are to overcome the Madeira rapids, and 
to open up to the world a land as fair as the Garden 
of the Lord.” 'The little steamer “Mercedita,” of 
856 tons, with 54 engineers and material, was de- 
spatched to San Antonio on 2nd January 1878. Her 
departure was made an important national occasion, 
and it is an historic fact, which may be confirmed by 
a reference to the files of Philadelphian papers of 
that date, that strong men, as well as women and 
children, sobbed aloud on the departure of the 
steamer. The vessel arrived at San Antonio on the 
16th February. They had barely started operations 
when, so they said, a Brazilian official told them, 
betraying some feeling, “when the English came 
here they did nothing but smoke and drink for two 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 183 


days, but Americans work like the devil.” Yet, by 
all accounts, the English method was right. I pre- 
fer it, on the Amazon. The preface to work there 
should be extended to three or even more days of 
drinking and smoking. 

Yet it must be said that if ever men should have 
honour for holding to a duty when it was far more 
easy, and even more reasonable, to leave it, then I 
submit the claim of those American engineers. 
Having lived in the place where many of them died, 
and knowing their story, I feel a certain kinship. 
There is no monument to them. No epic has been 
written of their tragedy. But their story is, I should 
think, one of the saddest in the annals of commerce. 
Of the 941 who left for San Antonio at different 
times, 221 lost their lives, mostly of disease, though 
80 perished in the wreck of a transport ship. That 
is far higher a mortality rate than that of, say, the 
South African or the American Civil War. 

Few of those men appeared to know the tropics. 
They thought “the tropics” meant only prodigal 
largess of fruits and sun and a wide latitude of life 
—a common mistake, 'The enterprise became a lin- 
gering disaster. Their state was already bad when 
a supply ship was lost; and they hopefully waited, 
ill and starving, but with a gallant mockery of their 
lot, as their letters and diaries attest, for food and 
medicine which were not to reach them. ‘The doc- 
tors continued the daily round of the host of the 
fever-stricken, giving them quinine, which was a 
deceit made of flour. The wages of all ceased for 
legal reasons, and they were in a place where little 


184 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


is cultivated, and so most food has to be imported 
m spite of a tariff which usually doubles the price 
of every necessary cf life. Some of the survivors, 
despairing and heroic souls, attempted to escape on 
rafts down the river; they might as well have tried 
to cut their way through the thousand miles of 
forest between them and Manaoés. The railway un- 
dertaking collapsed again, and the clearing, the 
huts, and the workshops, and the short line that was 
actually laid, were left for the vines and weeds to 
bury. But now again the conquering forest is be- 
ing attacked. The Madeira-Mamoré Railway has 
been recommenced, and our steamer, the “Capella,” 
is taking up supplies for the establishment at Porto 
Velho, from which the new railway begins, three 
miles this side of San Antonio. 


a a e a @ 


Til 


On the morning of the 23rd January, while we were 
still considering, seeing what the sun was like, and 
the languid air, and that we were reduced to tinned 
beans, fat bacon, and butter which was oil and flies, 
whether it was worth while to note our breakfast 
bell—the steward stood swinging it, with the grav- 
ity of a priest, under the break of the poop—a shout 
came from the bridge that the Rio Madeira was in 
view. 

As far back as Swansea we had heard legends of 
this stream, and they were sufficiently disturbing. 
When we arrived at Para we heard more, and 
worse. ‘The pilot we engaged there called the Ma- 
deira the “long cemetery.” At Serpa, for the first 
time, we saw what happened to frail humanity when 
it ventured far on the Madeira. One day a river 
steamer came to Serpa, with a cargo of men from 
San Antonio. The river steamers of the Amazon 
are vessels of broad beam and shallow draft, painted 
the dingy hue of the river itself, and they have two 
tiers of decks, open-air shelves, between the sup- 
ports of which the passengers sling their hammocks. 
The passengers do not sleep in bunks. This paddle- 
boat came throbbing towards where we were at 
anchor. It was night, and she was unseen, a palpi- 
tation in the dark accompanied somehow by a foun- 


tain of sparks. Such boats burn wood in their fur- 
185 


186 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


naces. When her noise had ceased, and her lights 
imperceptibly enlarged as the current dropped her 
down abeam of us, a breath of her, a draught of air, 
passed our way. I am more familiar now with the 
odour malaria causes, but then I thought she must 
have a freight of the dead. She anchored. We 
could see her loaded hammocks in the light of the 
few lamps she carried. Through the binoculars next 
morning I inspected with peculiar interest the row 
of cadaverous heads, with black tousled hair, lemon- 
coloured skins, open mouths and vacant eyes, which 
stared at us over her rails. Each looked as though 
once it had peered into the eyes of doom, and then 
was but waiting, caring nothing. 

There, ahead, was the Madeira now for us. We 
were then nearly a thousand miles from the sea, well 
within South America. But that meeting-place of. 
the Amazon and its chief tributary was an expanse 
of water surprising in its immensity. As much 
light was reflected from the floor as at sea. The 
water was oceanic in amplitude. The forest bound- 
aries were so far away that one could not realise, 
even when the time we had been on the river was 
remembered as a prolonged monotony, that this was 
the centre of a continent. ‘The forest on our port 
side was near enough for us to see its limbs and its 
vines; but to the south-west, where we were head- 
ing for Bolivia, and to the north, the way to the 
Guianas, and to the east, out of which we had come, 
and to the west, where was Peru, the land was but a 
low violet barrier, varying in altitude with distance, 
and with silver sections in rt, marking the river 


ee 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 187 


roads. In the north-west there was a broad silver 
path through the wall, the way to the Rio Negro, 
Manaos, and the Orinoco. In the south the near 
forest, being flooded, was a puzzle of islands. As 
we progressed they opened out as a line of green 
headlands. The Madeira appeared to have three 
widely separated mouths, with a complexity of in- 
termediate and connective minor ditches. Indeed, 
the gate of the river was a region of inundated 
jungle. One began to understand why travellers 
here sometimes find themselves on the wrong river. 

Our bows turned in to the forest wall, and for a 
few minutes I could not see any way for us there. 
The jungle parted, and we were on a narrow turgid 
flood, the colour of the main river, but swifter; a 
majestic forest was near to either beam. We were 
enclosed. And after we entered the Madeira my 
dark thoughts of our future at once left me. If they 
returned, it was only to be joked about, in the dry 
way one does refer to a dread that has been long in 
the distance, and then one day takes shape, becomes 
material, and settles down with us. Its form, as 
you know, nearly always allays your alarms. Your 
simple mind has expected something with the lower- 
ing face of evil. Lo! evil has even bright eyes. Its 
nature, its dark craft which you have dreaded, is not 
seen, and your mind grows light with surprise. 
What, only this, then? 

I never saw earth look more resplendent and 
chromatic than on the day when we entered that 
river with a bad name. Presently, I thought—here 
was a brief resurgence of the old gloom which had 


188 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


shrouded my conjectural Madeira—I might be 
called upon to pay the price for this surprising gift 
of intense colour, light, and luscious heat, for the 
quickening of the blood, as though the tropic air 
were a stimulant as well as a narcotic. Well, it does 
seem but fair, if chance, being happy, gives you a 
place in the tropics, to expect to have less time there 
than is given for the job of eking out a meagre exist- 
ence in the north. It would not be right to look 
for gain both ways. (You will have noticed already, 
I suppose, that I have not been on the Madeira 
fifteen minutes.) This, I thought, as I walked to 
and fro on the “Capella,” is different from that en- 
durance, bitter and prolonged, in the land where 
there is no sun worth mentioning, where the north- 
east wind blows, where the poor rate is so and so in 
the pound (and you are one of the fortunate if you 
pay it), and Lord Rosebery lectures on Thrift. I 
mentioned this to the Doctor. He did not remove 
his pipe from his mouth. 

Because (the idea dawned on me as I sank into a 
deck chair beside the surgeon under the poop awn- 
ing, and borrowed his silver tobacco-box), because, 
as to thrift and parching winds, abstinence and 
prudence, and lectures by the solemn on how to thin 
out your life in cold climates where all that is worth 
having is annexed, why praise a man who is willing © 
to deprave his life to sand and frost? There in 
merry England the poor wretch is, where the riches 
of earth are not broadcast largess as I see they are 
here, but are stacked on each side of the road, and 
guarded by police, leaving to him but the inclement 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 189 


highway, with nothing but Lord Rosebery’s advice 
and benediction to help him keep the wind out of 
the holes in his trousers; that benefit, and the bleak 
consideration that he may swink all day for a hand- 
ful of beans, or go without. What is prudence in 
that man? It is his goodwill for the police. To be 
blue nosed and meek at heart, and to hoard half the 
crust of your stinted bread, is to blaspheme the 
King of Glory. Some men will touch their crewns 
to Carnegie in heaven. 

Thrift and abstinence! They began to look the 
most snivelling of sins as I watched, with spacious 
leisure, the near procession of gigantic trees, that 
superb wild which did not arise from such niggard 
and flinty maxims. Frugality and prudence! That 
is to regard the means to death in life, the pallor and 
projecting bones of a warped existence, as good 
men dwell on courage, motherhood, rebellion, and 
May time, and the other proofs of vitality and 
growth. Now, I thought, I see what to do. All 
those improving lectures, reform leagues, university 
settlements, labour exchanges, and other props for 
crippled humanity, are idle. It is a generative idea 
that is wanted, a revelation, a vision. It would be 
easier and quicker to take regiments of folk out of 
Ancoats, Hanley, Bethnal Green, and the cottages 
of the countryside, for one long glance at the kind 
of earth I see now. The world would expand as 
they looked. They would get the dynamic sugges- 
tion. In vain, afterwards, would the monopolists 
and the superior persons chant patriotic verse to 
drown the noise of chain forging at the Westmin- 


190 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


ster foundry. Not the least good, that. The folk 
would not hear. Their minds would be absent and 
outward, not locked within to huddle with cramped 
and respectful thoughts. They would not start in- 
stinctively at the word of command. They would 
begin with dignity and assurance to compass their 
own affairs, and in an enormous way; and they 
would make hardly a sound as they moved forward, 
and they would have uplifted and shining eyes. 
(“Then you think more of ’em than I do,” said the 
surgeon. ) 

It would be no use, I saw clearly, sending the folk 
to Algeria, Egypt, or New York. Such places 
never betray to the traveller that our world is not a 
shapeless pareel of fields and buildings, tied up with 
bylaws, and sealed by the Grand Lama as his last 
act in the stupendous work of creation. There it is, 
an angular package in the sky, which the sun reads, 
and directs on its way to heaven in advance of its 
limited syndicate of proprietors. 

Here on the Madeira I had a vision instead of the 
earth as a great and shining sphere. ‘There were 
no fences and private bounds. I saw for the first — 
time an horizon as an arc suggesting how wide is our 
ambit. That bare shoulder of the world effaced 
regions and constellations in the sky. Our earth 
had celestial magnitude. It was warm, a living 
body. The abundant rain was vital, and the forest 
I saw, nobler in stature and with an aspect of in- 
tensity beyond what the Amazon forests showed, 
rose like a sign of life triumphant. 

You see what that tropical wilderness did for me, 


7 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 191 


and with but a single glance. Whatever comes 
- after, I shall never be the same again. The com- 
placent length of the ship was before us. Amidships 
were some of the fellows staring overside, absorbed. 
Now and then, when his beat brought him to the 
port side, I could see the head of the little pilot on 
the bridge. His colleague was sleeping in one of the 
hammocks slung between the stanchions of the poop 
awning. The Doctor was scrutinising a pair of 
motuca flies which hovered about his ankles, waiting 
for him to go to sleep. He wanted them for speci- 
mens. The Skipper, looking a little anxious, came 
slowly up the poop ladder, crossed over, and stood 
by our chairs. “The river is full of big timber,” he 
said. He went to stare overside, and then came 
back to us. “The current is about five knots, and 
those trees adrift are as big as barges. I hope they 
keep clear of the propeller.’ The Skipper’s eye 
was uneasy. He was glum with suspicion; he spoke 
of the way his fools might meet the wiles of fortune 
at a time when he was below and his ship was with- 
out its acute protective intelligence. He stood, a 
spare figure in White, in a limp grass hat with flap- 
ping eaves, gazing forward to the bridge mistrust- 
fully. He had brought us in a valuable vessel to a 
place unknown, and now he had to go on, and after- 
wards get us all out again. I began to feel a large 
respect for this elderly master mariner (who did not 
give the beard of an onion for any man’s sympathy ) 
who had skilfully contrived to put us where we 
were, and now was unaware what mischance would 
send us to rot under the forest wall, the bottom to 


ca 


192 + THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


fall out of our adventure just when we were in its 
narrowest passage and achievement was almost 
within view. “This is no place for a ship,” the cap- 
tain mumbled. “It isn’t right. We're disturbing 
the mud all the time; and look at those butterflies 
now, dodging about us!’ He was continuing this 
monologue as a dirty cap appeared at the head of 
the ladder, and a long and ragged length of sorrow- 
ful sailor mounted there, and doffed the cap. The 
Skipper brusquely signed to him*to approach. He 
was a youngster in an advanced stage of some 
trouble, and he had no English. I think he was a 
Swede. He demonstrated his sickness, baring his 
arm, muttering unintelligibly. ‘The limb, like his 
hand, was distorted with large blisters. There was 
his face, too. I mistrusted my equanimity for some 
moments, but braced my eyes, compelling them to 
be scientific and impersonal. By signs we gathered 
he had been sleeping on deck, such was the heat of 
the forecastle, and the mosquitoes, the Doctor said, 
had poisoned a body already tainted from the stews 
of Rotterdam. “The corroding spirit of the jungle 
was beginning to permeate through our flaws. 

The Doctor went to his surgery. The pilot sat up 
m his hammock, glanced indifferently at the sick 
sailor, yawning and stretching his arms, his dainty 
little brown feet dangling just clear of the deck. 
He began to roll a cigarette of something which 
looked like tea. Then he dropped out, and went 
forward to release his mate on the bridge, and the 
senior pilot came up as the Doctor had finished his 
job. ‘The junior pilot, a fragile, girlish fellow, 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 193 


rather taciturn, greets us always with a faintly su- 
percilious smile. His chief is a round, jolly little 
man, hearty, and lavish with ornamental gestures. 
We both smiled involuntarily as he marched across 
to us, with his uniform cap, bearing our ship’s 
badge, stuck on the back of his head with a bias to 
the right ear. There is not enough of Portuguese 
in our ship’s company to serve one conversation ade- 
quately, but we get on well with this pilot, and he 
with us. He sits in a hammock, making pantomime 
explanatory of Brazil to us strangers, and we pick 
him up with alacrity, after but brief pauses. While 
_ the Doctor beguiled him into dramatic moments, I 
lay back and watched him, searching for Brazilian 
characteristics, to report here. 

You know that, when you have returned from a 
far country, you are asked unanswerable questions 
about its people, and especially about its women. — 
We are easily flattered by the suggestion that we 
are authoritative, with opinions got from uncom- 
mon experience, especially where women with 
strange eyes and dark skins are concerned. So, 
once upon a time, I caught myself—or rather, I 
caught that cold, critical, and impartial part of me, 
which is a solemn fake—when answering a question 
of this kind, explaining in a comprehensive way the 
character of the Brazilian people, as though I were 
telling of the objective phenomena of one simple 
soul. Presently the wise and ribald part of me 
woke, caught the note of that inhuman voice, and 
raised a derisive cry, heard by me with grave dep- 
recation, but not heard at all by my listener. I 


194 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


stopped. For what do I know of the Brazilian 
character? Very little. Is there such a thng? I 
suppose the true Brazilian is like the true English- 
man, or the typical bird which is known by its bones, 
but may be anything from a crow to a nightingale, 
but is more likely a lark. You can imagine the for- 
elgner taking his knowledge of the British pick- 
pocket who met him at the landing-stage, the pen- 
portraits of Bernard Shaw, the Rev. Jeremiah 
Hardshell, Father O’F lynn, You, Me, the cabman 
who swore at him, his landlady and her daughter, 
Lloyd-George, Piccadilly by night, and Tom Bow- 
ling, carefully adjusting all that valuable British 
data, just as Professor Karl Pearson does his phy- 
sical statistics, and explaining the result as the 
modern English; adding, in the usual footnote, 
what decadent tendencies are to be deduced, in addi- 
tion, from the facts which could not be wore into 
the major premises. 

Now, there was the handsome Brazilian customs 
officer, tall, august, with dark eyes haughty and 
slow with thought, the waves of his romantic black 
hair faintly traced in silver, who might have been a 
poet, or a philosophic revolutionist; but who was the 
man, as the first mate told us (after we had searched 
everywhere for the articles) who “pinched your 
bloomin’ field-glasses and my meerschaum.” 

Take, if you like, the ultra-fashionable ladies at 
the Para hotel, who looked at us with sleepy eyes, 
and who, I suspect, were not Brazilians at all. Sup- 
posing they were, there must be counted the wife of 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 195 


the official at Serpa. She came aboard there with 
her husband to see an English ship; she reminded 
me of that picture of the Madonna by Sassoferrato 
in the National Gallery; I am unable to come nearer 
to justice to her than that. Again, there was a 
certain vain native apothecary, and he had the idea 
that I was bottle-washer to the “Capella’s” surgeon, 
much to that fellow’s secret delight. The chemist 
treated me with a studied difference in consequence; 
and though our surgeon could have undeceived the 
mistaken man, having some Portuguese, he refused 
to do so. I remember the pilot who, when he left 
us at Serpa, and I bade him farewell, did, before all 
our ship’s company, embrace me heartily, rest his 
cheek against mine, and make loving noises in his 
throat. And there is our present chief guide, now 
swinging in his hammock, and looking down upon 
us waggishly. ; 
He had not been a pilot always. Once he was a 
clown in a circus; that little fact is a clue to much 
which otherwise would have been obscure in him. 
When he boarded us at Serpa to take the place of 
the man who shrank from the thought of the Me- 
deira, the chart-room under the bridge was given to 
him, and as the mate put it, “he moved in.” He had 
bundles, boxes, bags, baskets, a tin trunk, a chair, 
a parrot, a hammock, and some pictures. He was 
‘going to be with us for two months, but his affair 
had the conclusive character of a migration, a final 
severance from his old life. His friends came to see 
him depart, and they. wound themselves in each 


196 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


others arms, head laid in resignation on shoulders. 
“Tooks as if we’re bound for the Golden Shore,” 
commented the boatswain. 

This little rounded man, the pilot, with his unctu- 
ous olive skin, tiny moustache of black silk, and im- 
pudent eyes, looked ripe in middle age, though 
actually -he was but thirty. He wore a suit of azure 
cotton, ironed faultlessly, and his tunic fitted with 
hooks and eyes across his throat. His boots were 
sulphur coloured and Parisian. A massive gold 
ring, which carried a carbonado nearly as large as 
the stopper of a beer bottle, was embedded in a fat 
finger of his right hand. In the front of his cap he 
had sewn the badge of our line, and he was curiously 
proud of that gaudy symbol. He would wear the 
cap on one ear, and walk up and down in display, 
with a lofty smile, and a carriage supposed to ap- 
pertain to a British officer in a grand moment. He 
had a great admiration for all that was British, ex- 
cept our food. If you were up at sunrise you could 
see him at his toilet, and the spectacle was worth the 
effort. His array of toilet vesicles reminded me of 
the shelves in a barber’s shop. Oiled and fragrant, he 
took his seat for breakfast with much formal polite- 
ness. He shook our saloon company into a sense of 
its responsibilities, for we had grown indifferent as 
to dress, and sometimes we had three-day beards. 
His handkerchiefs and linen were scented, and 
dainty with floral designs. And ours—oh, ours—! 
He took wine at breakfast, and after idling a little 
with our foreign dishes he would wipe his mouth on 
our tablecloth, and then leave for the bridge. As he 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE, 197 


passed across the poop we would hear him hawk 
violently, and spit on the deck. Then the Skipper 
would glare, and drive his chair backwards in a dark 
passion. 


Gazing at the foliage as it unfolded, our pilot 
named the paranas, tributaries, and islands, when 
they drew abeam. He told us what the trees were; 
and then with head shakes and uplifted hands and 
eyes, indicated what grave things were behind that 
screen of leaves. (Though I don’t suppose he 
knew.) His mimicry was so spontaneous and exact 
that it was more entertaining and just as instructive 
as speech. He taught us how the Indians kill you, 
and what some villagers did to a naughty padre, and 
how the sucuruju swallows a deer, and how to make 
love to a Brazilian girl. He kicked the slippers 
from his little feet, and smuggled into the hammock 
mesh for a snooze, waving a hand coyly to us over 
the edge of his nest. 

The dinner bell rang. Because the saloon is now 
hot beyond endurance, the steward has fixed a 
table on deck, and so, as we eat, we can see the 
jungle pass. That keeps some of our mind from 
_ dwelling over much on the dreary menu. The po- 
tatoes have begun to ferment. The meat is out of 
_ tins; sometimes it is served as fritters, sometimes we 
recognise it in a hash, and sometimes, shameless, it 
appears without dress, a naked and shiny lump 
straight from its metal bed. Often the bread is 
sour. The butter, too, is out of tins. Feeding is not 
a joy, but a duty. But it is soon over. Although 


198 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


everybody now complains of indigestion, we have 
far to go yet, and the cheerfulness which faces all 
circumstances brazenly must be our manna, Our 
table, some deal planks on trestles, is mellowed by 
a white tablecloth. We sit round on boxes. Over 
head the sun flames on the awning, making it golden 
and translucent. I let the soup pass. The next dish 
is a hot pot of tinned mutton and preserved vege- 
tables. Something must be done, and I do it then. 
There is some pickled beef and pickled onions. I 
watch the forest pass. Then, for desert, the stew- 
ard, the hot beads touring about the mounts of his 
large pale face, brings along oleaginous fritters of 
plum duff. The Doctor leaves. I follow him to the 
chairs again, and we exchange tobacco-boxes and 
fill our pipes. This may seem to you unendurable 
for long. I did not think so, though of habits so 
regular and engrained that my chances of survival, 
when viewed comparatively, for my ship mates were 
hardened and usually were more robust, seemed 
poor enough. But I enjoyed it. There was nour- 
ishment, a tonic stay, in our desire to greet every 
onset of the miseries, which now were camped about 
us, besieging our souls, with sansculotte insolence. 
We called to the Kumenides with mockery. Like 
Thoreau, I believe I could live on a tenpenny nail, 
if it comes to that. 

There is no doubt the forest influences our moods 
in a way you at home could not understand. Our 
minds take its light and shade, and just as our little 
company, gathered in the Chief’s room at a time 
when the seas were running high, recalled sombre 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 199 


legends which told of foredoom, so this forest, an 
intrusive presence which is with us morning, noon, 
and night, voiceless, or making such sounds as we 
know are not for our ears, now shadows us, the pre- 
science of destiny, as though an eyeless mask sat at 
table with us, a being which could tell us what we 
would know, but though it stays, makes no sign. 
This forest, since we entered the Para River, now 
a thousand miles away, has not ceased. ‘There have 
been the clearings of the settlements from Para in- 
wards; but as Spruce says in his Journal, those 
clearings and campos alter the forest of the Amazon 
no more than would the culling of a few weeds alter 
the aspect of an English cornfield. The few open- 
ings I have seen in the forest do not derange my 
clear consciousness of a limitless ocean of leaves, its 
deep billows of foliage rollmg down to the only 
paths there are in this country, the rivers, and there 
overhanging, arrested in collapse. There is no land. 
One must travel by boat from one settlement to an- 
other. The settlements are but islands, narrow foot- 
holds, widely sundered by vast gulfs of jungle. 
The forest of the Amazons is not merely trees 
_ and shrubs. It is not land. It is another element. 
Its inhabitants are arborean; they have been fash- 
ioned for life in that medium as fishes to the sea and 
birds to the air. Its green apparition is persistent, 
as the sky is and the ocean. In months of travel it 
is the horizon which the traveller cannot reach, and 
its unchanging surface, merged through distance 
into a mere reflector of the day, a brightness or a 
gloom, in his immediate vicinity breaks into a com- 


200 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


plexity of green surges; then one day the voyager 
sees land at last and is released from it. But we 
have not seen land since Serpa. ‘There are men 
whose lives are spent in the chasms of light where 
the rivers are sunk in the dominant element, but who 
never venture within its green surface, just as one 
would not go beneath the waves to walk in the twi- 
light of the sea bottom. 

Now I have been watching it for so long I see 
the outer aspect of the jungles does vary. When 
I saw it first on the Para River it appeared to my 
wondering eyes but featureless green cliffs. Then 
in the Narrows beyond Para I remember an impres- 
sion of elegance and placidity, for there, the waters 
still being tidal and saline, the palms were conspicu- 
ous and in profuse abundance. ‘The great palms 
are the chief feature of that forest elevation, with 
their graceful columns, and their generous and sym- 
metrical fronds which sometimes are like gigantic 
green feathers, and again are like fans. A tall 
palm, whatever its species, being a definite expres- 
sion of life—not an agglomeration of leaves, but 
body and crown, a real personality—the forest of 
the Narrows, populous with such exquisite beings, 
had marges of straight ascending lines and flourish- 
ing and geometrical crests. 

Beyond the river Xingu, on the main stream, the 
forest, persistent as a presence, again changed its 
aspect. It was ragged and shapeless, an impene- 
trable tangle, its front strewn with fallen trees, the 
vision of outer desolation. By Obydos it was more 
aerial and shapely again, but not of that light and 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 201 


soaring grace of the Narrows. It was contained, 
yet mounted not in straight lines, as in the country 
of the palms, but in convex masses. Here on the 
lower Madeira the forest seems of a nature inter- 
mediate between the rolling structure of the growth 
by Obydos, and the grace of the palm groves in the 
estuarine region of the Narrows. It is barbaric and 
splendid, easily prodigal with illimitable riches, 
sinking the river beneath a wealth of forms. 

On the Madeira, as elsewhere in the world of the 
Amazons, some of the forest is on “terra-firma,”’ as 
that land is called which is not flooded when the 
waters rise. ‘There the trees reach their greatest 
altitude and diameter; it is the region of the caa- 
apoam, the “great woods” of the Indians. A 
stretch of terra firma shows as a low, vertical bank 
of clay, a narrow ribbon of yellow earth dividing the 
water from the jungle. More rarely the river cuts 
a section through some undulating heights of red 
conglomerate—heights I call these cliffs, as heights 
they are in this flat country, though at home they 
would attract no more attention than would the side 
of a gravel-pit—and again the bank may be of that 
cherry and saffron clay which gives a name to Ita- 
coatiara. On such land the forest of the Madeira is 
immense, three or four species among the greater 
trees lording it in the green tumult expansively, — 
always conspicuous where they stand, their huge 
boles showing in the verdant facade of the jungle as 
grey and brown pilasters, their crowns rising above 
the level roof of the forest in definite cupolas. There 
is one, having a neat and compact dome and a grey, 


202 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


smooth, and rounded trunk, and dense foliage as 
dark as that of the holm oak; and another, resem- 
bling it, but with a flattened and somewhat dis- 
rupted dome. I guessed these two giants to be silk- 
cottons. Another, which I supposed to be of the 
leguminous order, had a silvery bole, and a texture 
of pale green leafage open and light, which at a dis- 
tance resembled that of the birch. These three trees, 
when assembled and well grown, made most stately 
riverside groups. The trunks were smooth and bare 
till somewhere near ninety feet from the ground. 
Palms were intermediate, filling the spaces between 
them, but the palms stood under the exogens, grow- 
ing in alcoves of the mass, rising no higher than the 
beginning of the branches and foliage of their lords. 
The whole overhanging superstructure of the forest 
—not a window, an inlet, anywhere there—was 
rolling clouds of leaves from the lower rims of which 
vines were catenary, looping from one green cloud 
to another, or pendent, like the sundered cordage 
of a ship’s rigging. Two other trees were frequent, 
the pao mulatto, with limbs so dark as to look black, 
and the castanheiro, the Brazil nut tree. 

The roof of the woods lowered when we were 
steaming past the igapo. The igapo, or aqueous 
jungle, through which the waters go deeply for 
some months of the year, is of a different character, 
and perhaps of a lesser height—it seems less; but 
then it grows on lower ground. I was told to note 
that its foliage is of a lighter green, but I cannot 
say I saw that. ‘It is in the igapo that the Hevea 
Braziliensis flourishes, its pale bole, suggestive of 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 203 


the white poplar, deep in water for much of the 
year, and its crown sheltered by its greater neigh- 
bours, so that it grows in a still, heated, and humid 
twilight. This low ground is always marked by 
growths of small cecropia trees. These, with their 
white stems, their habit of free and regular branch- 
ing, and their long leaves, digital in the manner of 
the horse-chestnut, have the appearance of great 
candelabra. Sometimes the igapo is prefaced by an’ 
area of cane. The numberless islands, being of re- 
cent formation, have a forest of a different nature, 
and they seldom carry the larger trees. The upper 
ends of many of the islands terminate in sandy pits, 
where dwarf willows grow. So foreign was the rest 
of the vegetation, that notwithstanding its volume 
and intricacy, I detected those humble little willows 
at once, as one would start surprised at an English 
word heard in the meaningless uproar of an alien 
multitude. 

‘The forest absorbed us; as one’s attention would 
be challenged and drawn by the casual regard, never 
noticeably direct, but never withdrawn, of a being 
superior and mysterious, so I was drawn to watch 
the still and intent stature of the jungle, waiting for 
it to become vocal, for some relaxing of its static 
form. Nothing ever happened. I never discovered 
it. Rigid, watchful, enigmatic, its presence was 
constant, but without so much as one blossom in all 
its green vacuity to show the least friendly familiar-_ 
ity to one who had found flowers and woodlands 
kind. It had nothing that I knew. It remained se- 
curely aloof and indifferent, till I thought hostility 


204 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


was implied, as the sea implies its impartial hostility, 
in a constant presence which experience could not 
fathom, nor interest soften, nor courage intimidate. 
We sank gradually deeper inwards towards its cen- 
tral fastnesses. 

By noon on our first day on the Madeira we 
reached the village of Rozarinho, which is on the 
left bank, with the tributary of the same name a 
little more up stream, but entering from the other 
side. Here, as we followed a loop of the stream, the 
Madeira seemed circumscribed, a tranquil lake. The 
yellow water, though swift, had so polished a sur- 
face that the reflections of the forest were hardly 
disturbed, sinking below the tops of the inverted 
trees to the ultimate clouds, giving an illusion of 
profundity to the apparent lake. ‘The village was 
but a handful of leaf huts grouped about the 
nucleus of one or two larger buildings with white 
walls, There was the usual jetty of a few planks to 
which some canoes were tied. ‘The forest was a high 
background to those diminished huts; the latter, as 
we came upon them, suddenly increased the height 
of the trees. 

In another place the shelter of a family of In- 
dians was at the top of a bank, secretive within the 
base of the woods. A row of chocolate babies stood 
outside that nest, with four jabiru storks among 
them. Each bird, so much taller than the babies, ~ 
stood resting meditatively on one leg, as though 
waiting the order to take up an infant and deliver 
it somewhere. None of them, storks or infants, took 
the least notice of us. Perhaps the time had not yet 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 205 


come for them to be aware of mundane things. 
Certainly I had a feeling myself, so strange was 
the place, and quiet and tranquil the day, that we 
had passed world’s end, and that what we saw be- 
yond our steamer was the coloured stuff of dreams 
which, if a wind blew, would wreathe and clear; 
vanish, and leave a shining void. The sunset deep- 
ened this apprehension. There came a wonderful 
sky of orange and mauve. It was over us and came 
‘down and under the ship. We moved with glow- 
ing clouds beneath our keel. There was no river; 
the forest girdled the radiant interior of a hollow 
sphere. 

The pilots could not proceed at night. Shortly 
after sundown we anchored, in nine fathoms. The 
trees were not many yards from the steamer. When 
the ship was at rest a canoe with two Indians came 
alongside, with a basket of guavas. They were shy 
fellows, and each carried in his hand a bright ma- 
chete, for they did not seem quite sure of our com- 
pany. After tea we sat about the poop, trying to 
smoke, and, in the case of the Doctor and the Pur- 
ser, wearing at the same time veils of butterfly nets, 
as protection from the mosquito swarms. The net- 
ting was put over the helmet, and tucked into the 
neck of the tunic. Yet, when I poked the stem of 
the pipe, which carried the gauze with it, into my 
mouth, the veil was drawn tight on the face. A 
mosquito jumped to the opportunity, and arrived. 
Alongside, the frogs were making the deafening 
clangour of an iron foundry, and through that 
sound shrilled the cicadas. I listened for the first 


206 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


time to the din of a tropical night in the forest. 
There is no word strong enough to convey this 
uproar to ears which have not listened to it. 

Jan, 24. A bright still sunrise, promising heat; 
and before breakfast the ship’s ironwork was too hot 
to touch. The novelty of this Madeira is already 
beginning to merge into the yellow of the river, the 
blue of the sky, and the green of the jungle, with 
but the occasional variation of low roseous cliffs. 
The average width of the river may be less than a 
quarter of amile. It is loaded with floating timber, 
launched upon it by “terras-cahidas,” landslides, 
caused by the rains, which carry away sections of 
the forest each large enough to furnish an English 
park with trees. Sometimes we see a bight in the 
bank where such a collapse has only recently oc- 
curred, the wreckage of trees being still fresh. 
Many of the trees which charge down on the current 
are of great bulk, with half their table-like base high 
out of the water. Occasionally rafts of them ap- 
pear, locked with creepers, and bearing flourish- 
ing gardens of weeds. This characteristic gives the 
river its Portuguese name, “river of wood.” ‘The 
Indians know the Madeira as the Cayary, “white 
river.” 

Its course to-day serpentines so freely that at 
times we steer almost east, and then again go west. 
Our general direction is south-west. At eight this 
morning, after some anxious moments when the 
river was dangerous with reefs, we passed the vil- 
lage of Borba, 140 miles from Serpa. Here there 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 207 


is a considerable clearing, with kine browsing over 
a hummocky sward that is well above the river on 
an occurrence of the red clay. ‘This release of the 
eyes was a smooth and grateful experience after 
the enclosing walls. Some steps dug in the face of 
the low cliff led to the white houses, all roofed with 
red tiles. The village faced the river. From each 
house ascended the leisurely smoke of early morn- 
ing. ‘The church was in the midst of the houses, its 
bell conspicuous with verdigris. Two men stood to 
watch us pass. It was a pleasant assurance to have, 
those roofs and the steeple rising actually into the 
light of the sky. The dominant forest, in which 
we were sunk, was here definitely put down by our 
fellow-men. 

We were beyond Borba, and its parana and 
island just above it, before the pilot had finished 
telling us, where we watched from the “Capella’s” 
bridge, that Borba was a settlement which had suf- 
fered much from attacks of the Araras Indians. 
The river took a sharp turn to the east, and again 
went west. Islands were numerous. These islands 
are lancet-shaped, and lie along the banks, sepa- 
rated by side channels, their paranas, from the land. 
The smaller river craft often take a parana instead 
of the main stream, to avoid the rush of the current. 
The whole region seems lifeless. There is never a 
flower to be seen, and rarely a bird. Sometimes, 
though, we disturb the snowy heron. On one sandy 
island, passed during the afternoon, and called ap- 
propriately, Ilho do Jacaré, we saw two alligators. 
Otherwise we have the silent river to ourselves; 


208 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


though I am forgetting the butterflies, and the con- 
stant arrival aboard of new winged shapes which 
are sometimes so large and grotesque that one is 
uncertain about their aggressive qualities. As we 
idle on the poop we keep by us two insect nets, and 
a killing-bottle. The Doctor is making a collection, 
and I am supposed to assist. 

When I came on deck on the morning of our 
arrival in the Brazils it was not the orange sunrise 
behind a forest which was topped by a black design 
of palm fronds, nor the warm odour of the place, 
nor the height and intensity of the vegetation, which ~ 
was most remarkable to me, a new-comer from the 
restricted north. It was a butterfly which flickered 
across our steamer like a coloured flame. No other 
experience put England so remote. 

A superb butterfly, too bright and quick to be 
anything but an escape from Paradise, will stay its 
dancing flight, as though with intelligent surprise 
at our presence, hover as if puzzled, and swoop to 
inspect us, alighting on some such incongruous 
piece of our furniture as a coil of rope, or the cook’s 
refuse pail, pulsing its wings there, plainly nothing 
to do with us, the prismatic image of joy. Out 
always rush some of our men at it, as though the 
sight of it had maddened them, as would a revela- 
tion of accessible riches. It moves only at the last 
moment, abruptly and insolently. They are left to 
gape at its mocking retreat. It goes in erratic 
flashes to the wall of trees and then soars over the 
parapet, hope at large. 

Then there are the other things which, so far as 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 209 


most of us know, have no names, though a sailor, 
wringing his hands in anguish, is usually ready with 
aname. To-day we had such a visitor. He looked 
a fellow the Doctor might require, so I marked him 
down when he settled near a hatch on the after- 
deck. He was a bee the size of a walnut, and hab- 
ited in dark blue velvet. In this land it is wise to 
assume that everything bites or stings, and that 
when a creature looks dead it is only carefully 
watching you. I clapped the net over that fellow 
and instantly he appeared most dead. Knowing he 
was but shamming, and that he would give me no as- 
sistance, I stood wondering what I could do next; 
then the cook came along. The cook saw the situ- 
ation, laughed at my timidity with tropical forms, 
went down on his knees, and caught my prisoner. 
_ The cook raised a piercing cry. 

On the bridge I saw them levelling their glasses 
at us; and some engineers came to their cabin doors 
to see us where we stood on the lonely deck, the 
cook and the Purser, in a tableau of poignant trag- 
edy. The cook walked round and round, nursing 
_his suffering member, and I did not catch all he 
said, for I know very little Dutch; but the spirit of 
it was familiar, and his thumb was bleeding badly. 
The bee had resumed death again. The state of 
the cook’s thumb was a surprise till the surgeon 
exhibited the bee’s weapons, when it became clear 
that thumbs, especially when Dutch and rosy, like 
our cook’s, afforded the right medium for an artist 
who worked with such mandibles, and a tail that 
was a stiletto. 


210 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


In England the forms of insect life soon become 
familiar. There is the housefly, the lesser cabbage 
white butterfly, and one or two other little things. 
In the Brazils, though the great host of forms is 
surprising enough, it is the variety in that host 
which is more surprising still. Any bright day on 
the “Capella” you may walk the length of the ship, 
carrying a net and a collecting-bottle, and fill the 
bottle (butterflies, cockroaches, and bugs not ad- 
mitted), and perhaps have not three of a species. 
The men frequently bring us something buzzing in 
a hat; though accidents do happen half-way to 
where the Doctor is sitting, and the specimen is 
mangled in a frenzy. A hornet came to us that 
way. He was in violet armour, as hard as a crab, 
was still stabbing the air with his long needle, and 
working on a fragment of hat he held in his jaws. 
But such knights in mail are really harmless, for 
after all they need not be interfered with. It is the 
insignificant little fellows whose object in life it is 
to interfere with us which really make the differ- 
ence. | 

So far on the river we have not met the famous 
pium fly. But the motuca fly is a nuisance during 
the afternoon sleep. It is nearly of the size and 
appearance of a “blue-bottle” fly, but its wings, 
having black tips, look as though their ends were — 
cut off. The motucas, while we slept, would alight 
on the wrists and ankles, and where each had fed ~ 
there would be a wound from which the blood stead- 
ily trickled. | 

The mosquitoes do not trouble us till sundown. 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 211 


But one morning in my cabin I was interested in 
the hovering of what I thought was a small, leggy 
spider which, because of its colouration of black and 
grey bands, was evasive to the sight as it drifted 
about on its invisible thread. At last I caught it, 
and found it was a new mosquito. In pursuing it 
I found a number of them in the cabin. When I 
exhibited the insect to the surgeon he did not well 
disguise his concern. “Say nothing about it,” he 
said, “but this is the yellow-fever brute,” So our 
interest in our new life is kept alert and bright. 
The solid teak doors of our cabins are now perma- 
nently fixed back. Shutting them would mean 
suffocation; but as the cabins must be closed before 
sundown to keep out the clouds of gnats, the car- 
penter has made wooden frames, covered with cop- 
per gauze, to fit the door openings at night, and 
rounds of gauze to cap the open ports; and: with a 
damp cloth, and some careful hunting each morn- 
ing, one is able to keep down the mosquitoes which 
have managed to find entry during the night and 
have retired at sunrise to rest in dark corners. For 
our care notwithstanding the insects do find their 
way in to assault our lighted lamps. The Chief, 
partly because as an old sailor he is a fatalist, and 
partly because he thinks his massive body must be 
invulnerable, and partly because he has a contempt, 
anyway, for protecting himself, each morning has 
a new collection of curios, alive and dead, littered 
about his room. (I do not wonder Bates remained 
in this land so long; it is Elysium for the entomolo- 
gist.) One of the live creatures found in his room 


212 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


the Chief retains and cherishes, and hopes to tame, 
though the object does not yet answer to his name 
of Edwin. This creature is a green mantis or pray- 
ing insect, about four inches long, which the Chief 
came upon where it rested on the copper gauze of 
his door-cover, holding a fly in its hands, and. eating 
it as one would an apple. This mantis is an enter- 
taining freak, and can easily keep an audience 
watching it for an hour, if the day is dull. Edwin, 
in colour and form, is as fresh, fragile, and trans- 
lucent as a leaf in spring. He has a long thin neck 
—the stalk to‘his wings, as it were—which is quite 
a third of his length. He has a calm, human face 
with a pointed chin at the end of his neck; he turns 
his face to gaze at you without moving his body, 
just as a man looks backwards over his shoulder. 
This uncanny mimicry makes the Chief shake with 
mirth. Then, if you alarm Edwim, he springs 
round to face you, frilling his wings abroad, stand- 
ing up and sparring with his long arms, which have 
hooks at their ends. At other times he will remain 
still, with his hands clasped up before ‘his face, as 
though in earnest devotion, for a trying period, If 
a fiy alights near him he turns his face that way and 
regards it attentively. Then sluggishly he ap- 
proaches it for closer scrutiny. Having satisfied 
himself it is a good fly, without warning his arms 
shoot out and that fly is hopelessly caught in. the 
hooked hands. He eats it, I repeat, as you do 
apples, and: the authentic mouthfuls of fly can be 
seen passing down his glassy neck. Edwin is fragile - 
as a new leaf in form, has the same delicate colour, 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 213 


and has fascinating ways; but somehow he gives an 
observer the uncomfortable thought that the means 
to existence on this earth, though intricately and 
wonderfully devised, might have been managed dif- 
ferently. Edwin, who seems but a pretty fragment 
of vegetation, is what we call a lie. His very exist- 
ence rests on the fact that he is a diabolical lie. 
Gossamers in the rigging to-day led the captain 
to prophesy a storm before night. Clouds of an 
indigo darkness, of immense bulk, and motionless, 
reduced the sunset to mere runnels of opaline light 
about the bases of dark mountains inverted in the 
heavens. There was a rapid fall of temperature, but 
no rain. Our world, and we in its centre on the 
“Capella,” waited for the storm in an expectant 
hush. Night fell while we waited. The smooth 
river again deepened into the nadir of the last of 
day, and the forest about us changed to material 
ramparts of cobalt. The pilot made preparations to 
anchor. ‘The engine bell rang to stand-by, a sum- 
mons of familiar urgency, but with a new and 
alarming note when heard in a place like that. The 
forest made no response. A little later the bell 
clanged rapidly again, and the pulse of our steamer 
slowed, ceased. We could hear the water uncoil- 
ing along our plates. The forest itself approached 
us, came perilously near. The Skipper’s voice cried 
abruptly, “Let go!” and at once the virgin silence 
was demolished by the uproar of our cable. The 
“Capella” throbbed violently; she literally undu- 
lated in the drag of the current. We still drifted 
slowly down stream, ‘The second anchor was 


214 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


dropped, and held us. The silence closed in on us 
instantly. Far in the forest somewhere, while we 
were whispering to each other in the quiet, a tree 
fell with a deep, significant boom. | 
Jan. 25. We had been under way for more than 
an hour when my eyes opened on the illuminated 
panorama of leaves and boles unfolding past the 
door of my cabin. The cicadas were grinding their 
scissors loudly in the trees alongside. I spent much 
of this day on the bridge, where I liked to be, 
watching the pilot at work. The Skipper was there, 
and in a cantankerous mood. The pilot wants us to 
make a chart of the river. He has given the captain 
and me a long list of islands, paranas, tributaries, 
villages, and sitios. Every map and reference to the 
river we have on board is valueless. A map of the 
river indicates many settlements with beautiful 
names; and at each point, when we arrive, nothing 
but the forest shows. How the cartographers ar- 
rived at such results is amystery. This river, which 
their generous imaginings have seen .as a tortuous 
bough of the Amazon, laden with villages which 
they indicate on their maps with marks like little 
round fruits, is almost barren. Every day we pass 
small sitios or clearings; maybe the map-makers 
mean such places as those. Yet each clearing is but 
a brief security, a raft of land—the size of the 
garden of an English villa—lonely in an ocean 
of deep leaves, where a rubber man has built him- 
self a timber house, and some huts for his serfs. 
It will have a jetty and a huddle of canoes, and 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 215 


usually a few children on the bank watching us. 
We salute that place with our syren as we pass, and 
sometimes the kiddies spring for home then as 
though we were shooting at them. Or we see a 
little embowered shack with a pile of fuel logs be- 
side it, and a crude name-board, where the river 
boats replenish when traversing this stream, during 
the season, for rubber. Our pilots have much to 
say of these stations, and of all the rubber men on 
the river and their wealth. But away with their 
rubber! I am tired of it, and will keep it out of this 
book if I can. For it is blasphemous that in such a 
potentially opulent land the juice of one of its 
wild trees should be dwelt upon—as it is in the 
states of Amazonas and Para—as though it were 
the sole act of Providence. The Brazilians can see 
nothing here but rubber. The generative qualities 
of this land through fierce sun and warm showers— 
for rarely a day passes without rain, whatever the 
season—a land of constant high summer with a free 
fecundity. which has buried the earth everywhere 
under a wild growth nearly two hundred feet deep, 
is insignificant to them. ‘They see nothing in it at 
all but the damnable commodity which is its ruin. 
Para is mainly rubber, and Manaos. The Amazon 
is rubber, and most of its tributaries. ‘The Madeira 
particularly is rubber. The whole system of com- 
munication, which covers 34,000 miles of navigable 
waters, waters nourishing a humus which literally 
stirs ‘beneath your feet with the movements of 
spores and seeds, that system would collapse but 
for the rubber. The passengers on the river boats 


216 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


are rubber men, and the cargoes are rubber. All 
the talk is of rubber. ‘There are no manufactures, 
no agriculture, no fisheries, and no saw-mills, in a — 
region which could feed, clothe, and shelter the 
population of a continent. There was a book by 
a Brazilian I saw at Para, recently published, and 
called the “Green Hell” (Inferno Verde). On its 
cover was the picture of a nude Indian woman, sym- 
bolical of Amazonas, and from wounds in her body 
her blood was draining into the little tin cups which 
the rubber collector uses against the incisions on the 
rubber tree. From what I heard of the subject, 
and I heard much, that picture was little overdrawn. 
‘I begin to think the usual commercial mind is the 
‘most dull, wasteful, and ignorant of all the sad 
* wonders in the pageant of humanity. 

It is only on the “Capella’s” bridge that you feel 
the stagnant air which is upset by the steamer’s 
progress. There it spills over us, heavy with the 
scent of the lairage on the fore deck. The bridge is 
a narrow, elevated outlook, full in the sun’s eye, 
where I can get a view of the complete ship as she 
serpentines in her narrow way. On the.port side 
of it the Skipper has a seat, and there now he sits all 
day, gazing moodily ahead. The dapper little pilot 
stands centrally, throwing brief commands over his 
shoulder into the open window of the wheel-house, 
where a sailor, gravely chewing tobacco, his hands. 
on the wheel, is as rapt as though in a trance. I 
think the pilot finds his way by divination. The 
depth of the river is most variable. In the dry 
season I hear the stream becomes but a chain of 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 217 


pools connected by threads which may be no more 
than eighteen inches deep, the rest of its bed being 
dry mud cross-hatched by sun cracks. The rains 
in far Bolivia, overflowing the swamps there, during 
some months of the year increase the depth of the 

Madeira by forty-five feet. The local rainy season 
would make hardly any difference to it. The river 
is fed from reservoirs which stretch beneath the 
Andes. 

_ There is rarely anything to show why, for a spell, 
the pilot should take us straight ahead in mid- 
stream, and then again tack to and fro across, some- 
times brushing the foliage with our shrouds. I have 
plucked a bunch of leaves in an unexpected swoop 
inshore. And the big timber comes down afloat 
to meet us in a never-ending procession; there are 
the propellor blades to be thought of. I see, now 
and then, the swirls which betray rocks in hiding, 
and when dodging those dangerous places the screw 
disturbs the mud and the stinks. But the pilot 
takes us round and about, we with our 300 feet of 
length and 28 feet draught, as a man would steer 
a motor car. To aid it our rudder has had fixed to 
it a false wooden length. The “Capella” is a very 
good girl, as responsive. to the pilot’s word as though 
she knew that he alone can save her. She stems 
_ this powerful current at but four knots, and some- 
times we come to places where, if she hesitated for 
but two seconds, we should be put athwart stream 
to close the channel. And what would happen to 
us with nothing but unexplored malarial forest each 
side of us is net useful to brood on. Occasionally 


218 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


the pilot, grasping the top of the “dodger,” stares 
beyond us fixedly to where the refracted sunshine 
is blinding between the green cliffs, and gives quick 
and numerous orders to the wheelhouse without 
turning his head. The Skipper gets up to watch. 
The “Capella” makes surprising swerves, the pilot 
nervously taps the boards with his foot. . . . Then 
he says something quietly, relaxes, and comes to us 
blithely, the funny dog with a nonsense story, and 
the Skipper sinks couchant again. Once more I 
watch the front of the jungle for what may show 
there. Seldom there is anything new which shows. 
It is rare, even when close alongside, that one can 
trace the shape of a leaf. ‘There are but the con- 
spicuous grey nests of the ants and wasps. Yet 
several times to-day I saw trees in blossom; domes 
of lilac in the green forest roof. Again, to-day we 
put up a flight of hundreds of ducks; and another 
incident was a black-water stream, the Rio Mataua, 
the line of demarcation between the Madeira’s yel- 
low flood and its dark tributary being distinct. 
Jan. 26. 'The forest is lower and more open, and 
the pao mulatto is more numerous. We saw the 
important village of Manicoré to-day, and Oncas, 
a little place within a portico of the woods which 
was Veiled in grey smoke, for they were coagulating 
rubber there. For awhile before sunset the sky 
was scenic with great clouds, and glowing with the 
usual bright colours. 'The wilderness was trans- 
formed. Each evening we seem to anchor in a region 
different, in nature and appearance, under these 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 219 


extraordinary sunset skies, from the country we 
have been travelling since daylight. Transfigura- 
tion at eventime we know in England. Yet sunset 
there but exalts our homeland till it seems more 
intimately ours than ever, as though then came a 
luminous revelation of its rare intrinsic goodness. 
We see, for some brief moments, its aura. But this 
tropical jungle, at day-fall, is not the earth we 
know. Ii is a celestial vision, beyond physical at- 
taining, beyond knowledge. It is ulterior, glorious, 
transient, fading before our surprise and wonder 
fade. We of the “Capella” are its only witnesses, 
except those pale ghosts, the egrets about the dim 
aqueous base of the forest. _ 

Darkness comes quickly, the swoop and over- 
spread of black wings. The stopping of the ship’s 
heart, because the pulsations of her body have had 
unconscious response in yours, as by an incorporeal 
ligament, is the cessation of your own life. At a 
moment there is a strange quiet, in which you be- 
gin to hear the whisper of inanimate things. A log 
glides past making faint labial sounds. You are 
suddenly released from prison, and float lightly in 
an ether impalpable to the coarse sounds and move-. 
ments of earth, but which is yet sensitive to the 
most delicate contact of your thoughts and emo- 
tions. ‘The whispering of your fellows is but the 
rustling of their thoughts in an ilimitable and in- 
violate silence. 

Then, almost imperceptibly, the frogs begin 
their nightlong din . The crickets and cicadas Join. 
Between the varying pitch of their voices come 


220 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


other nocturnes in monotones from creatures un- 
known to complete the gamut. There are notes so 
profound, but constant, that they are a mere im- | 
pression of obscurity to the hearing, as when one 
peers listening into an abysm in which no bottom 
is seen, and others are stridulations so attenuated 
that they shrill beyond reach. 

A few frogs begin it. There are ululations, wells 
of mellow sound bubbling to overflow in the dark, 
and they multiply and unite till the quality of the 
sound, subdued and pleasant at first, is quite 
changed. It becomes monstrous. The night 
trembles in the powerful beat of a rhythmic clan- 
gour. One cannot think of frogs, hearing that 
metallic din. At one time, soon after it begins, the 
chorus seems the far hubbub, mingled and levelled 
by distance, of a multitude of people running and 
disputing in a place where we who are listening 
know that no people are. The noise comes nearer 
and louder till it is palpitating around us. It might 
be the life of the forest, immobile and silent all day, 
now released and beating upwards in deafening 
paroxysms. 

Alongside the engine room casing amidships the 
engineers have fixed an open-air mess-table, with a 
hurricane Jamp in its midst, having but a brief halo 
of light which hardly distinguishes the pickle jar 
from the marmalade pot. A haze of mosquitoes 
quivers round the light. ‘The air is hot and lazy, 
and the engineers sit about limply in trousers and 
shirts, the latter open and showing bosoms as var- 
ious as faces. The men cheer themselves with com- 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 221 


ical plaints about the heat, the food, the Brazils, and 
make sudden dabs at bare flesh when the insects 
bite them. The Chief rallies his boys as would a 
cheery dad—Sandy, though, is nearly his own age, 
but still much of a lad, quietly despondent—and 
the Chief heartily insists on food, like it or lump it. 
I go forward to the captain’s tea table on the poop 
deck, where we have two hurricane lamps, and 
where the figures of us round the table, in that dis- 
mal glim, are the thin phantoms of men. The lamps 
have been lighted only that moment, and as we take 
our seats, the insects come. Just as sharply as 
though something derisive and invisible were throw- 
ing them at us, big mole crickets bounce into our 
plates. A cicada, though I was then unaware of 
his identity, a monstrous fly which looked as large 
as a rat, and with a head like a lantern, alighted be- 
fore me on the cloth, and remained still. Picking it 
up tentatively it sprang a startling police rattle be- 
tween my finger and thumb, and the other chaps 
shouted their merriment. The steward places a 
cup of tea before each of us, and in an interval 
of the talk the Skipper announces a smell of par- 
affin in his cup. We experiment with ours, and - 
gravely confirm. ‘The surgeon, bending close to a 
light with his cup, the deep characteristics of his 
face strongly accentuated—he seems but a bodiless 
head in the dark—says he detects globules of fat. 
The Skipper crudely outlines this horror to the 
steward, who makes an inaudible reply in German, 
and disappears down the companion. We get a 
new and innocent brew. 


222 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


There is hash for us. There is our familiar the 
pickled beef. There are saucers of brown onions. 
There are saucers of jam and of butter: To-night 
the steward has baked some cakes, and their grate- 
ful smell and crisp brown rugged surface, studded 
with plums, determine in my mind a resolution to 
eat four of them, if I can get them-without open 
shame. I assert that our Skipper has a counting 
eye for the special dishes; though you may eat all 
the hash you want. Damn his hash! The bread 
is sour. I want cakes. 

After tea the pilots get into their hammocks and 
under their curtains, out of the way of the mos- 
-quitoes. We know where they are because of the 
red ends of their cigarettes. We sit around any- 
where, the Skipper, the Chief, the Doctor and the 
Purser. There is little to be said. We talk of the 
mosquitoes, in ejaculations, for the little wretches 
quite easily penetrate linen, and can manage even 
worsted socks. Occasionally flying insects bump 
into the tin lamp placed above us on the ice chest. 
(No; there is no ice.) Thin divergent arrows of 
light, the fireflies, lace the gloom, and the trees 
alongside are gemmed with them. We find still less 
to say to each other, but fear to retire to our heated 
berths, for as it is just possible to breathe in the 
open we continue to defy the mosquitoes. The first 
mate serenades us on his accordion. At last there 
is no help for it. The steward comes to tell the 
master that his cot is ready. The “old man” sleeps 
in a cot draped with netting, and slung from the 
awning beams on the starboard side. Nightly he 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE Tay 


turns in there, and unfailingly a rain cloud bursts 
in the very early morning, pounding on the awning 
till the cool spray compels him, and he retreats in 
his pyjamas for shelter, taking his pillow with him. 
It is for that reason I do not use the cot he made for 
me, which hangs on the port side; though it is de- 
lightful for the afternoon nap. 

The Skipper disappears. The Doctor and I go 
below to the surgery, and from the settee there he 
removes books, tobacco tins, fishing tackle, phials, 
india rubber tubing, and small leather cases, making 
room for us both, and first we have some out of his 
bottle, and then we try some out of mine. The stuff 
is always tepid, for the water in the carafe has a 
temperature of 80 degrees. The perspiration be- 
gins a steady permeation as we talk, for now we 
can talk, and talk, being together, and talking is 
better than sleep, which at its best is but a fitful 
doze in the tropics. We fall, as it were, on each 
other’s necks. Though the Doctor’s breast—I say 
nothing of mine—is not one which appears to in- 
vite the weak tear of a fellow mortal who is har- 
assed by solitude. You might judge it too cold, 
too hard and unresponsive a support, for that; and 
I have seen his eye even repellent. “He is not 
elderly, but he is grey, and pallid through too much 
of the tropics. The lines descending his face show 
he has been observing things for long, and does not 
think much of them. When disputing with him, he 
does not always reply to you; he smiles to himself; 
a habit which is an annoyance to some people, whose 
simple minds are suspicious, and who are unaware 


224 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


that the surgeon is sometimes forgetful that his 
weaker brethren, when they are most heated and 
disputative with him, then most lack confidence in 
their case, and need the confirmation of the wit they 
know is superior. ‘That is no time when one should 
look at the wall, and smile quietly. The “Capella’s” 
company feel that the surgeon stands where he 
overlooks them, and they see, where he stands un- 
assumingly superior, that he looks upon them po- 
litely. They do not know he is really sad and for- 
getful; they think he is amused, but that he prefers 
to pretend he is well bred. I must confess it is 
known he has prescience having a certain devilish 
quality of penetration. ‘There was one of our 
stokers, and one night he was drunk on stolen gin, 
and latitudinous, and so attempted a curious an- 
swer to the second engineer, who sought him out in 
the forecastle concerning work. Now the second 
engineer is a young man who has a number of photo- 
graphs of himself which display him, clad but in 
vanity and shorts, back, front, and profile, arms 
folded tightly to swell his very large muscles. He 
has really a model figure, and he knows it. The 
cut over the stoker’s nose was a bad one. 

To the surgeon the stoker went, early next morn- 
ing, actually ‘for a hair of the dog, but with a story 
that he was then to go on duty, and so would miss — 
his ration of quinine, which is not served till eleven 
o'clock, ‘The quinine, as you know, is given in gin. 
The surgeon complimented theman on’such proper 
attention to his health, and willingly gave him the 
quinine—in water. He also stood at the door of 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 225 


the alleyway to watch the man retained the quinine 
as far as the engine room entrance. _ 

Eight bells! Presently I also must go and pre- 
tend to sleep. ‘The surgeon’s last cheery comment 
on the cosmic scheme remains but as a wry smile on 
our faces. We grope in our minds desperately for 
a topic to keep the talk afloat. There goes one 
bell! 

I arrive at my haunt of cockroaches, where the 
second mate is already asleep on the upper shelf. 
The brown light of the oil lamp has its familiar 
flavour, and the cabin is like an oven. What a 
prospect for sleep! Raising the mosquito curtain 
carefully I slip through the opening like an acrobat, 
hoping to be ahead of the insidious little malaria 
carriers. A drove of cockroaches scuttles wildly 
over my warm mattress as I arrive. Striking 
matches within what the sailor overhead calls my 
meat safe, I examine my enclosure carefully for 
mosquitoes, but none seems to be there, though I 
know very well I shall find at least a dozen, gorged 
with blood, in the morning. ‘The iron bulkhead 
which separates my bed from the engine room is, of 
course, hot to the touch. The air is a passive weight. 
The old insect bites begin to irritate and burn. I 
kick the miserable sheet to the foot, and lie on my 
back without a movement, for I fear I may suffo- 
cate in that shut box. My chest seems in bonds, 
and for long there is no relief, though the body 
presently grows indifferent to the misery, and the 
anxiety goes. It is remarkable to what brutality 

the body will submit, when it knows it must. Yet 


226 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


nothing but a continuous effort of will kept the 
panic suppressed, and me in that box, till the feel- 
ing of anxiety had passed. 'Thenceforward the 
sleepless mind, like a petty balloon giddy on a thin 
but unbreakable thread of thought, would tug at my 
consciousness, revolving and dodging about, in spite 
of my resolution to keep it still. If I could only 
break that thread, I said to myself, turning over 
again, away it would fly out of sight, and I should 
forget all this . .. all this . . . And presently it 
broke loose, and dwindled into oblivion. 

Then I knew nothing more till I saw, fixed 
where I was in hopeless horror, the baby face of one 
I dwell much upon, in moments of solitude, and it 
had fallen wan and thin, and was full of woe un- 
utterable, and its appealing eyes were blind. I 
woke with a cry, sitting up suddenly, the heart go- 
ing like a rapid hammer, ‘There was the curtained 
box about me. The clothes were on the hooks. I 
could see the black shape of the cabin doorway. 
By my watch it was four o’clock. The air had 
cooled, and as I sat waiting for the next thing in 
the silence the mate snored profoundly overhead. 
Ah! So that was all right. 

Jan, 27. 'This has been a day of anxious naviga- 
tion, for the river has had frequent reefs. We re- 
main in a stagnant chasm of trees. The surgeon 
and I, accompanied by a swarm of flies, went for- 
ward into the cattle stew this morning to see how 
the beasts fared. The patient brutes were suffering 
badly, and some, quite plainly, were dying. ‘The 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE O27, 


change from the lush green stuff of the Itacoatiara 
swamps to compressed American hay put under 
their noses on an iron deck, and the stifling heat 
under partial awnings, had ruined them. Some 
stood, heads down, legs straddled, too indifferent 
to disperse the loathly clouds of parasites. Most 
were plagued by ticks, which had the tenacity and 
appearance of iron bolt heads. But the little black. 
cow, the rebel, blared at us, bound and suffering 
as she was. Vive la revolution! We drove the flies 
from her hide, and she tried to kick us, the darling. 
We found a steer with his shoulder out of joint, 
lying inert in the sun, indifferent to further out- 
rage. That had to be seen to, and we told the Skip- 
per, who ordered it to be killed. We wanted some 
fresh meat badly, he added. ‘The boatswain ex- 
plained that he knew the business, and he brought 
a long knife, and quite calmly thrust it into the 
front of the prone creature, and seemed to be try- 
ing to find its heart. Nothing happened, except a 
little blood and some convulsive movements. An- 
other sailor produced a short knife and a hammer, 
and tapped away behind the horns as though he 
were a mason and this were stone. The frowning 
surgeon supposed the fellow was trying to sever the 
vertebrae. I don’t know. Yet another fellow 
jumped on its abdomen. At last it died. I put 
down merely what happened. No two voyages are 
alike, and as this episode came into mine, here it is, 
to be worked in with the sunsets and things. There 
was some cheerful talk at the prospect of the first 
_ fresh meat since England, and later, passing the 


228 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


al 
cook’s galley, I saw an iron bin, and lifted its cover 
to see what was there.. And there was, as I judged 
there would be, liver for tea that evening. But I 
learned that though I am a carnivore yet I have not 
the pluck to be a vulture. 

The next day we passed the Cidada de Humayta, 
the chief town on the Madeira. Actually it was 
of the size of an unimportant home village. ‘There 
was nothing there to support the pilot’s sonorous 
title of cidada. For some reason we were visited 
to-day by an extraordinary number of butterflies. 
One large specimen was of an olive green, barred 
with black. Another had wings of a bluish grey, 
striped with vermilion. Helicons came, and once a 
morpho, the latter a great rarity away from the 
interior of the woods. At four in the afternoon the 
sky grew ominous. We had just time to notice the 
trees astern suddenly convulsed, writhing where 
they stood, and the storm sprang at us, roaring, 
ripping away awnings and loose gear. ‘The noise 
in the forest round us was that of cataclysm. ‘The 
rain was an obscurity of falling water, and the trees 
turned to shadows in a grey fog. The ship became 
full of waterspouts, large streams and jets curving 
away from every prominence. This lasted for but 
twenty minutes; but the impending clouds remained 
to hasten night when we were in a place which, 
more than anything I have seen, was the world be- 
fore the coming of man. The river had broadened 
and shallowed. The forest enclosed us. There were 
islands, and the rank growth of swamps. We could 
see, through breaks in the igapo, extensive lagoons 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 229 


beyond, with the high jungle brooding over empty 
silver areas. Herons, storks, and’egrets were white 
and still about the tangle of aqueous roots. It was | 
all as silent and other world as a picture. 


Jan. 29, When shouting awakened me this morn- 
ing I saw the Chief hurry by my cabin, half-dressed, 
and looking very anxious. By the almost stationary 
foliage I could see the ship had merely way on her. 
Out I jumped. On the forecastle head a crowd was 
gathered, peering overside. <A large tree was 
balanced accurately athwart our stem, and refused 
to move. What worried the staff was that it would, 
when free, sidle along our plates till it fouled the 
propeller. The propeller had to be kept moving, 
for the river was narrow and its current unusually 
rapid. There the log obstinately remained for the 
most of: an hour, but suddenly made up its mind, 
and went, clearing the stern by inches. After that 
the engines were driven full, for the pilot hoped to 
get us to Porto Velho by nightfall. In the late 
afternoon, when passing the Rio Jamary, the clouds 
again banked astern, bringing night before its time, 
and another violent storm compelled an early an- 
chorage. ‘The forest was remarkably quiet after 
the tumult of the squall, and the “Capella” had been 
put over to the left bank, when close to us on the 
opposite shore there was a landslip. We saw a 
section of the jungle wall sway, as though that part 
was taken by a local tempest, and then the green 
cliff and its supports fell bodily into the river, rais- 
ing thunderous submarine explosions. Such land- 


230 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE ~ 


slides, terras cahidas, can be rarely foreseen, and 
are a grave danger to craft when they come close 
in to rest at night. To-day we passed a small raft 
drifting down. A hut was erected in its fo 
and we saw two men within. 

Jan. 30. Talk enough there has been of a pe 
called Porto Velho, a name I heard first when I 
signed the articles of the “Capella” at Swansea, 
and of what would happen to us when we arrived. 
But I am looking upon it all as a strange myth. 
There has been time to prove those superstitions of 
Porto Velho. And what has happened? There 
was a month we had of the vacant sea, and one day 
we came upon a low coast where palms grew. There 
has been a month which has striped the vacant mind 
in three colours, constant in relative position, but 
without form, yellow floor, green walls, and a blue 
ceiling. Plainly weshave got beyond*all the works 
of man now. We have intrigued an ocean steamer 
thousands of miles along the devious waterways of 
an uninhabited continental jungle, and now she 
must be near the middle of the puzzle, with voiceless 
regions: of unexplored forest reeking under the 
equatorial sun at every point of the compass. The 
more we advance up the Amazon and Madeira 
rivers the less the likelihood, it seems to me, of 
getting to any place where our ship and cargo could 
be required, We shall steam and steam till the 
river shallows, the forest closes in, and we are 
trapped. Yet the Madeira looks now much the same 
as when we entered it, still as broad and deep. I 
was thinking this morning we might go on so for 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 231 


ever; that this adventure was all of the casual im- 
probabilities of a dream was in my mind when, 
smoking the after breakfast pipe on the bridge, we 
turned a corner sharply, and there was the end of 
the passage within a mile of us, Porto Velho at last. 

The forest on the port side ahead was uplifted on 
an unusually high cliff of the red rock. Beyond 
that cliff was a considerable clearing, with many 
buildings of a character different from any we had 
seen in the country. At the end of the clearing 
the forest began again, unconquered still, standing 
across our course as a high barrier; for, leaving 
Porto Velho, the river turned west almost at a right 
angle, and vanished; as though now it were done 
with us. Wehad arrived. A rough pier was being 
thrown out on palm boles to receive us, but it was 
not ready. We anchored in five fathoms, about 
thirty yards from the shore, and in the quiet which 
came with the stop of the ship’s life we waited for 
the next thing, all hands lining the “Capella’s”’ side 
surveying this place of which we had heard so much. 

Plainly this was not the usual village. Many 
acres of trees had been newly cleared, leaving a 
great bay in the woods. The earth was still raw 
from a recent attack on what had been inviolate 
from time’s beginning. ‘Trenches, new red gashes, 
scored it, and holes were gouged in the hill side. 
You could think man had attacked the forest here 
in a fury, but had spent his force on one small spot, 
as though he had struck one wound again and again. 
The fight was over. The footing had been won, a 
base perhaps for further campaigns because 


pis) THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


wooden emergency houses, sheds and barracks, had 
been built. The assailant evidently had made up 
his mind to settle on his advantage, though he was 
tolerating a little quickly rebellious scrub. Just 
then he was resting, as if the whole affair had been 
over but five minutes before we came, and now the 
conqueror was sleeping on his first success. Com- 
pletely round the conquered space the jungle stood 
indifferently regarding the trifle of ground it had 
lost. The jungle on the near opposite shore rose 
straight and uninterrupted from the river, the front 
rank, lost each way in distance, of an innumerable 
army. At the upper end of the clearing the jungle 
began again on our side, and turned to run across 
our bows, the complement of the host across the 
water, and both ranks continued up stream, dark 
and indeterminate lines converging, till, three miles 
away, a delicate flickering of light, a mere dimmer, 
faint but constant, bridged the two walls. No doubt 
that delicate light would be the San Antonio cata- 
racts, the first of the nineteen rapids of the Ma- 
deira.. 

Porto Velho behaved as though we were not 
there. A pitiless sun flamed over that deep red 
wound in the forest, and they who had made it were 
in their shelters, resting out of sight after such a 
recent riot of exertion. Nothing was being done 
then. ‘Two or three white men stood on the dis- 
mantled foreshore, placidly regarding us. We 
might have been something they were not quite sure 
was there, a possibility not sufficiently interesting 
for them to verify. There was a hint of mockery, 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 233 


after all our anxiety and travail, in this quiet dis- 
regard. Had we arrived too late to help, and so 
were not wanted? I confess I should not have been 
surprised to have heard suppressed laughter, some 
light hilarity from the unseen, at us innocently puz- 
zling as to what was to happen next. There was 
a violent scream in the forest near our bows, and we 
turned wondering to that green wall. A locomotive 
ran out from the base of the trees, still screaming. 

In a little while a man left a house, striding down 
over the debris to the foreshore, and some half- 
breeds brought him in a canoe to the “Capella.” He 
was a tall youngster, an American, and his slow 
body itself was but a thin sallow drawl; only his 
eyes were alert, and they darted at ours in quick 
scrutiny. His solemn occupying assurance and 
accent precipitated reality. He was a doctor and he 
ordered us to be mustered. on the after deck for 
inspection for yellow fever. We were passed; and 
then this doctor went below to the saloon, distribut- 
_ ing his long limbs and body over several chairs and 
part of the table, and began with lazy words and 
gestures to give us a place in the scene. We learned 
we should stay as we were till the pier was finished 
and that the railway was actually in being for a 
short distance. He said something about Porto 
Velho being hell. 

He left us. We sat about on deck furniture, and 
waited on the unknown gods of the land to see what 
they would send us. All day in the clearing figures 
moved about on some mysterious business, but sel- 
dom looked at us. We had nothing to do but to 


234 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


watch the raft of timber and flotsam expand about 
our hawsers, a matter of some concern to us, for the 
current ran at six knots. Our brief sense of contact 
got from the medical inspection had gone by night. 
Reality contracted, closing in upon the “Capella” 
with rapidly diminishing radii as the light went, till 
we had lost everything but our steamer. 

Into the saloon, where some of us sat listening in 
sympathy to the Skipper’s growls that night, burst 
our cook, disrespectful and tousled, saying he had 
seen a canoe, which bore a light, overturn in the 
river. There was a stampede. We each seized a 
lantern and leaned overside with it, with that fatu- 
ous eagerness to help which makes a man strike 
matches when looking for one who is lost on 4 
moor. Ghostly logs came floating noiselessly out 
of darkness into the brief domain of our lanterns, 
and faded into night again. From somewhere in 
the collection of driftwood beyond our bows we 
thought we heard an occasional cry, though that 
might have been the noise of water sucking through 
the rubbish, or the creaking of timbers. Our chief 
mate got out a small boat, and vanished; and we 
were already growing anxious for him when his 
luminous grin appeared below in the range of my 
lantern, and with him came the ponderous figure 
of aman. The latter, deft and agile, came up the 
rope ladder, and stepped aboard with innocent in- 
consequence, shocking my sense of the gravity of 
the affair; for this streaming object, lifted from the 
grip of the boney one just in time, was chuckling. 
“Say,” said this big ruddy man to our gaping 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 235 


crowd, “I met a nigger ashore with a letter for the 
captain of this packet. Said he didn’t know how 
to get. So I brought tt, but a tree overturned the 
canoe. J came up under the timber jam all right, 
all right, but it took me quite a piece to get my head 
through.” In the saloon, with a pool of water 
spreading round him, while we got him some dry 
clothes, he produced this pulpy letter. “Dear 
Captain” (it ran), “I’m as dry as hell, have you 
brought drinks in the ship?” 

The bland indifference of Porto Velho to the 
“Capella,” which had done so much to get there; 
the locomotive which ran screaming out of those 
woods where, till then, was the same unbroken front 
which from Para inwards had surrendered nothing; 
the inconsequential doctor who carefully exammed 
us for what we had not got; the ruddy man who 
rose to us streaming out of the deeps, as though 
that were his usual approach, bearing another 
stranger’s unreasonable letter complaining of thirst, 
were most puzzling. I even felt some anxiety and 
suspicion. What, then, were all the other incidents 
of our difficult six thousand mile voyage? What 
was this place to which we had come on urgent busi- 
ness long and carefully deliberated, where men 
merely looked at the whites of our eyes, or changed 
wet clothes in the saloon, or lightly referred to hell 
—they all did that—as if hell were an unremarkable 
feature of their day? Were all these unrelated 
shadows and movements but part of a long and 
witless jest? The point of it I could not see. Was 
there any point to it or did casual episodes appear 


236 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


at unexpected places till they came, just as unex- 
pectedly, to an empty end? ‘The man the mate 
had rescued sat at the saloon table opposite me, 
leaning a yard wide chest, which was almost bare, 
on the red baize, his bulging arms resting before 
him, and his hairy paws easily clasped. I thought 
that perhaps this imperturbable being, who could 
come with easy assurance, his bright friendly eyes 
merely amused, his large firm mouth merely mock- 
ing, and his face heated, from a desperate affair in 
which his life nearly went, to announce to strangers, 
“Boys, I’m old man Jim,” must have had the point 
of the joke revealed to him long since, and so now 
had no respect for its setting, and could have no care 
and understanding of my anxious innocence. He 
sat there for hours in quiet discourse. I listened 
to him with my ears only, his words jostling my 
thoughts, as one’ would puzzle over and listen to a 
superior being which had unbent to be intimate, but 
was outside our experience. I heard he had been 
at this place since 1907. He began the work here. 
Porto Velho did not then exist. Off where we were 
anchored, the jungle rose. He had his young son 
with him, a cousin, and two negroes, and he began 
the railway. Inside the trees, he said, they could 
not see three yards, but down it all had to come. 
There is a small stingless bee here, which “old man 
Jim” called the sweat bee. It alights in swarms on 
the face and hands, and prefers death to being dis- 
lodged from its enjoyment. The heat, these bees, 
the ants, the pium flies, the mosquitoes, made the 
existence of Jim and his mates a misery. Jim merely 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 237 


drawled about in a comic way. Fever came, and 
mistrust of natives compelled him to dress a dummy, 
put that in his hammock at night, while he slept in a 
corner of the hut, one eye open, nursing a gun. 
I could not see “old man Jim” ever having faith 
that trains would run, or needed to run, where In- 
dians lurked in the bush, and jaguars nosed round 
the hut at night. Why these sufferings then? But 
we learned the line now penetrated into the forest 
for sixty miles, and that beyond it there were camps, 
where surveyors were seeing that further way was 
made, and beyond them again, among the trees of 
the interior, the surveyors were still, planning the 
way the line should run when it had got so far. 


Though we could not get ashore, there was 
enough to watch, if it were only the men leisurely 
driving palm boles into the river, making a pier for 
us. While at breakfast to-day a canoe of half- 
breeds came flying towards us in pursuit of an 
object which kept a little ahead of them in the river. 
It passed close under our stern, and we saw it was 
a peccary. ‘The canoe ran level with it then, and a 
man leaned over, catching the wild pig by a hind 
leg, keeping its snout under water while another 
secured its feet with rope. It was brought aboard 
in bonds as a present for the Skipper, who begged 
the natives to convey it below to the bunkers and 
there release it. He said he would tame it. I saw 
the eye of the beast as it lay on the deck champing 
its tusks viciously, and guessed we should have some 
interesting moments while kindness tried to reduce 


238 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


that light in its eye. The peccary disappeared for 
a few days. 

There being nothing to do this fine morning, we 
watched the cattle put ashore. ‘This was not so 
difficult a business as shipping them, for the beasts 
now submitted quietly to the noose which was put 
on their horns. The steam tackle hoisted them, they 
were pushed overside, and dropped into the river. 
Some natives in a canoe cleared the horns, and the 
brute, swimming desperately in the strong current, 
was guided to the bank. Some of the beasts being 
already near death they were merely jettisoned. 
The current bore them down stream, making feeble 
efforts to swim—food for the alligators. We waited 
for the turn of the black heifer. She was one of the 
last. She was not led to the ship’s side. The tackle 
was attached to her horns, and made taut before 
her head was loosed. She made a furious lunge at 
the men when her nose was free, but the winch 
rattled, and she was brought up on her hind 
legs, blaring at us all. In that ugly manner she was 
walked on two legs across the deck, a heroine in 
shameful guise, while the men laughed. She was 
hoisted, and lowered into the river. She fought at 
the waiting canoe with her feet, but at last the men 
released her horns from the tackle. With only her 
face above water she heaved herself, open mouthed, 
at the canoe, trying to bite it, and then made some 
almost successful efforts to climb into it. ‘The canoe 
men were so panic-stricken that they did nothing 
but muddle one another’s efforts. The canoe rocked 
dangerously. ‘This wicked animal had no care for 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 239 


its own safety like other cattle. It surprised its 
tormentors because it showed its only wish was to 
kill them. Just in time the men paddled off for 
their lives, the cow after them. Seeing she could 
not catch them, she swam ashore, climbed the bank, © 
looking round then for a sight of the enemy—but 
they were all in hiding—and then began browsing 
in the scrub. 

As leisurely as though life were without end, the 
work on the pier proceeded; and we on the “Ca- 
pella,” who could not get ashore, with each of our 
days a week long, looked round upon this remote 
place of the American tropics till it seemed we had 
never looked upon anything else. The days were 
candent and vaporous, the heat by breakfast-time 
being such as we know at home in an early after- 
noon of the dog-days. The forest across the river, 
about three hundred yards away, from sunrise till 
eight o’clock, often was veiled in a white fog. There 
would be a clear river, and a sky that was full day, 
but not the least suspicion of a forest. We saw what 
seemed a limitless expanse of bright water, which 
merged into the opalescent sky walls. Such an in- 
visible fog melted from below, and then the revela- 
tion of the dark base of the forest, in mid-distance, 
was as if our eyes were playing tricks. The forest 
appeared in the way one magic-lantern picture 
grows through another. The last of the vapour 
would roll upwards from the tree-tops for some 
time, and you could believe the woods were smoul- 
dering heavily. ‘Thenceforward the quiet day 
would be uninterrupted, except for the plunge of 


240 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


a heavy fish, the passing of a canoe, a visit from an 
adventurous visitor from the shore, or the growing 
of a cloud in the sky. We tried fishing, though 
never got anything but some grey scaleless crea- 
tures with feelers hanging about their gills. It 
was not till the evening when the visitors usually 
came that the day began really to move. The new 
voices gave our saloon and cabins vivacity, and the 
stories we heard carried us far and swiftly towards 
the next breakfast-time. ‘They were strange char- 
acters, those visitors, usually Americans, but some- 
times we got an Englishman or a Frenchman. 
They took possession of the ship. | 

There was an elderly man, Neil O’Brien, who was 
often with us. At first I thought he was a very 
exceptional character. He was one of the first 
to visit our ship. I even felt a little timidity when 
alone with him, for he had a habit of sitting limply, 
looking at nothing in particular, and dumb, and 
plainly he was a man whose thoughts ran in ways I 
could not even surmise. His pale blue eyes would 
turn upon me with that searching openness which 
may mean childish innocence or madness, and I 
could not forget the whispers I had heard of his 
dangerously inflammable nature. I could not find 
common footing with him for some time. My trouble 
was that I had come out direct from a country 
where few men are free, and so most of us live in 
doubt of what would happen to us if we were to act 
as though we were free men. Where, if a self-re- 
liant man contemptuously dares to a bleak and 
perilous extremity, he makes all his lawful fellows 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 241 


in-draw their timid breaths; that land where even 
a reward-has been instituted, as for merit, for un- 
complaining endurance under life-long hardships, 
and called an old-age pension. You cannot live 
much of your life with natural servants, the judi- 
cious and impartial, the light shy, and those who 
look twice carefully, but never leap, without betray- 
ing some reflected pallor of their anemia. O’Brien, 
the quiet master of his own time, with his eyes I 
could not read, and his gun, betrayed obliquely in 
our casual talks together such an ingenuous indif- 
ference to accepted things and authority, that I had 
nothing to work with when gauging him. He was 
his own standard of conduct. I judged his bearing 
towards the authority of officials would be tolerant, 
and even tender, as men use with wilful children. 
He was not a rebel, as we understand it, one who 
at last grows impatient and angry, and so votes for 
the other party. I suppose he was not opposed to 
authority, unless it were opposed to him. He was 
outside any authority but his own. He lived with- 
out State aid. He himself carried the gun, always 
the symbol of authority, whether of a man or of a 
State, and if any man had attempted to rob him 
of his substance, certainly O’Brien would have shot 
that man according to his own law and his own 

prophecy, and would then have cooked his supper. 
_ He surprised me for a day or two. I puzzled much 
over this phenomenon of a free man, who took his 
freedom so quietly and naturally that he never 
even discussed the subject, as we do, with enthusi- 
asm, in England. What else? It was long since 


242 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


he was separated from his mother. Soon I found 
he was but a type. I met others like him in this 
country. Their innocence of the limitations of a 
careful man like myself was disconcerting. Once 
O’Brien casually proposed that I should “beat it,” 
cut the ship, and make a traverse of that wild place 
to distant Colombia, to some unknown spot by the 
approximate source of a certain Amazon tributary, 
where he knew there was gold. First I laughed, 
and then found, from his glance of resentful can- 
dour, that he was quite serious. He generously 
meant this honour for me; and I think it was an 
honour for an elderly, quiet, and seasoned privateer 
like O’Brien, to invite me to be his only companion 
in aregion where you must travel with alert courage 
and wide experience, or perish. I have learned 
since he has gone to that far place alone. But what 
a time he will have. He will have all of it to himself. 
Well—I was thinking, when I refused him, of my 
old age pension. I should like to get it. 

Men like O’Brien are called here, quite respect- 
fully, “bad men,” and “land sailors.’’ ‘The lawless 
lands of the South American republics—lawless in 
this sense, that their laws need be little reckoned 
by the daring, the strong, and the unscrupulous— 
seem particularly attractive to men of the O’Brien 
type. I got tolike them. I found them, when once 
used to their feral minds, always entertaining, and 
often instructive, for their naive opinions cut our 
conventions across the middle, showing the surpris- 
ing insides. They dwell without bounds. As I 
have read somewhere, we do not think of the buf- 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 243 


falo, which treats a continent as pasturage, as we do 
of the cow which kicks over the pail at milking time 
and jumps the yard fence. These men regard 
priest, magistrate and soldier with an indifference 
which is not even contemptible indifference. They 
are merely callous to the calculated effect of uni- 
forms. When in luck, they are to be found in the 
cities, shy and a little miserable, having a good time. 
Their money gone, they set out on lonely journeys 
across this continent which show our fuss over 
authentic explorers to be a little overdone. O’Brien 
was suchaman. He told me he had not slept under 
a roof for years. He had no home, he confessed 
to me once. Any place on the map was the same 
to him. He had spent his life drifting alone be- 
tween Patagonia and Canada, looking for what he 
never found, if he knew what he was looking for. 
His travels were insignificant to him. He might 
have been a tramp talking of English highways. 
As he droned on one evening I began to doubt he 
was unaware that his was an extraordinary nar- 
rative. I guessed his unconcern must be an air. 
It would have been, in my case. I looked straight 
over at him, and he hesitated nervously, and 
stopped. Was he wasting my time, he asked? 
Prospecting for his illusion, his last journey was 
over the Peruvian Andes into Colombia. He broke 
an arm in a fall on the mountains, set it himself, 
and continued. On the Rio Yapura an Indian shot 
an arrow through his leg, and O’Brien dropped in 
the long grass, breaking the arrow short each side 
of the limb, and in an ensuing long watchful duel 


244 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


presently shot the Indian through the throat. And 
then, coming out on the Amazon, his canoe over- 
turned, and the pickle jar full of gold dust was 
lost. He put no emphasis on any particular, not 
even on the loss of his gold. 

He was pointed out to me first as a singular fel- 
low who kept doves; a tall, gaunt man, with a 
deliberate gait, perhaps fifty years of age, in old 
garments, long boots laced to the knees, and a 
battered pith helmet. He strolled along with his 
eyes cast down. If you met him abroad, and 
stopped him, he answered you with a few mumbles 
while looking away over your shoulder. His big 
mouth drew down a grizzled moustache cynically, 
and one of his front teeth was gold plated. Before 
he passed on he looked at you with the haughty but 
doubtful stare of an animal. He seemed too slow 
and dull to be combustible. I ceased to credit those 
tales of his berserker rage. He always moved in 
that deliberate way, as if he were careful, but bored. 
Or he stood before his doves, and made bubbling 
noises in his loose, stringy throat. He embarrassed 
me with a present of many of the trophies he had 
secured in years of travel in the wilds. One day a 
negro and O’Brien were in mild dispute on the 
jetty, and the negro called the white a Yankee. 
The river was twenty feet below swiftly carrying 
its logs. O’Brien took the big black, and with 
vicious ease threw him into the water. The negro 
missed the floating rubbish, and struck out for the 
bank. No one could help him. By good luck he 
managed to get to the water-side; yet O’Brien 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 245 


meanwhile had hurried his long legs over the ties of 
the skeleton structure, his face transfigured, and 
was waiting for the negro to emerge, a spade in his 
hand. But under other circumstances I have not 
the least doubt he would have fought the Brazilian 
army single-handed, and so finished, in defence of 
that same negro. 


IV 


Nicut brought one of these men to each of our 
cabins, and put a party of them drinking in the 
saloon. After my habit of thinking of people in 
crowds, as an Anglican Church, or an ethical so- 
ciety, a labour movement, a federation of pro- 
prietors, or suffragists, or Jews, or stockbrokers’ 
clerks, crowds moving with massed exactitude by 
the thousand at least, when prompted, this man 
O’Brien standing on his two legs by himself, old 
man Jim, and the rest, each of them defending 
and running his own particular kingdom, and gov- 
erning that, ill or well—for I saw them fairly 
drunk now and then—and never waiting for a word 
from any master or delegate, made me wonder 
whether till then I had met a living man, or had 
heard merely of a population of bundles of news- 
papers. These men had no leaders. They attended 
to all that. Each had to find his own way. They 
were unrelated to anything I knew, and beyond 
the help of even a candidate for Parliament. I 
suppose they had never heard of a Defence League. 
They could have found no use for it, because a 
challenge to defend themselves would never catch 
them unwilling or unable. Each man soldiered him- 
self, and perhaps was rather too ready to deal with 
a show of insolence, or an assumption of power in 


another. Yet they were not the violent and head- 
246 


_THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 247 


strong fellows of romantic tales. They were simple 
and kind, submitting with a sick smile to the prickly 
ridicule of their fellows round the board. They 
regarded meat, drink, and tobacco as common; they 
were ready to leap into the dark for a friend. 

There was one young bearded Englishman 
among them who was more than a friendly figure 
tome. All were friendly; but the Americans bore 
themselves with the easy assurance of the favoured 
heirs of Adam; though their successful work in that 
tropical swarsp perhaps justified them. ‘The Eng- 
lishman had less of that assurance of a unique 
favour which was so completely bestowed that irre- 
solution never shook the aplomb of its lucky inher- 
itors. He came into my cabin one night, hoping he 
was not disturbing me, and bringing as a present a 
sheaf of native arrows tipped with red and blue 
macaw feathers, as he had promised. 

“They come from Bolivia—forest Indians— 
three hundred miles from here.” He explained he 
had reached our point in the Brazilian forest from 
the Pacific side. He had crossed the mountains, 
_ descended to the level jungle at the base of the 
Andean wall, and followed the rivers eastward, 
alone in a canoe till he chanced upon our steamer 
unloading Welsh fuel into a forest clearing. To 
a new-comer in a mysterious land, this was a clear 
invitation to listen, and I looked at the man expec- 
tantly. He was lighting his pipe. The country 
through which he must have passed was unknown, 
as our maps showed. But he simply indicated that 
manner of his advent, as though it were the same 


e 


248 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


as any other, and sat looking through the door of 
my cabin, smoking, absently gazing at the ett 
scene on the after-deck. 

The hombres were working at the hold fated 
ately below us, their labours made obscurely bright 
by a roaring flame of volatalised oil, The light 
pulsed on. the face of the Englishman, and 
chequered my cabin in black and luminous gold. 
Of all the region of forest about us nothing showed 
but a cloud of leaves, which leaned towards us out 
of the night, supported on two pale, tremulous 
columns. The hold of the ship was a black rec- 
tangle, and the almost naked negroes and brown 
men moving about it, or peering into the chasm, 
were like sinister figures on an inscrutable business 
about the verge of the pit. They were not men, but 
the debris of men, moving with awful volition, 
merely a bright cadaverous mask hovering in a void, 
or two arms upheld, or a black headless trunk. For 
the roaring illuminant on deck dismembered the 
ship and its occupants, bursting into the weight of 
surrounding night as a fixed explosion, beams rigid 
and glowing, and shadows in long solid bars radiat- 
ing from its incandescent heart. 

“I’m glad you’re here,” said my companion. He 
never gave me his name, and I do not know it now. 
“IT hav’n’t heard home talk for a year. Havn't 
heard much of anything. A little Spanish coming 
along; and here some American.” 

We continued looking at the puzzling, disrupted — 
scene outside for some time without speaking, secure 
in a chance and lucky sympathy. Then a basket 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 249 


of coal tipped against a hatch coaming and whirled — 
away, scattering the men. We rose to see if any 
were hurt. 

“Curious, this desperate haste, isn’t it?” said the 
Englishman. “At every point of the compass from 
here there’s at least a thousand miles of wilderness. 
Excepting at this place it wouldn’t matter to any- 
body whether a thing were done to-night, or next 
week, or not at all. But look at those fellows— 
you'd think this was a London wharf, and a tide 
had to be caught. Here they are on piece-work and 
overtime, where there’s nothing but trees, alligators, 
tigers, and savages. An unknown Somebody in 
Wall Street or Park Lane has an idea, and this is 
what it does. The potent impulse! It moves men 
who don’t know the language of New York and 
London down to this desolation. It begins to fer- 
ment the place. The fructifying thought! Have 
you seen the graveyard here? We’ve got a fine 
cemetery, and it grows well. Still, this railway 
will get done. Yes, people who don’t know what 
it’s for, they'll make a little of it, and die, and more 
who don’t know what it’s for, and won’t use it when 
it’s made, they'll finish it. This line will get its 
freights of precious rubber moving down to replen- 
ish the motor tyres of civilisation, and the chap who 
had the bright idea, but never saw this place, and 
couldn’t live here a week, or shovel dirt, or lay a 
track, and wouldn’t know raw rubber if he saw it, 
he'll score again. Progress, progress! The wilder- 
ness blossoms as the rose. It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” 
I was just a little annoyed. After all, I was part 


be 
y 


250 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


of the job. Id made my sacrifices, too. But I 
admitted what he said. Why not? It was some- 
thing, that fancy, that every rattle of the winch 
outside, bringing up another load, moved abruptly 
under the impulse of another thought from London 
Town—six thousand miles away; two months’ 
travel. Great London Town! It was true. If 
London shut off its good will that winch would 
stop, and the locomotives would come to a stand to 
rot under the trees, and the lianas would lock their 
wheels; and in a month the forest would have 
foundered the track under a green flood. Where 
the American accent was dominant, the jaguars 
would moan at night. That long wound in the 
forest would be annealed and invisible in a year. 
While it persisted, the idea could conquer and main- 
tain. 

“Yes, but it’s all chance,” said the Englishman. 

“That uncertain and impersonal will controls us. 
Have you ever worked desperately, the fever in 
your bones, at a link in a job the rest of which was 
already abandoned, though you didn’t know it? Yet 
perhaps even so there is something gained, the 
knowledge that all you do is fugitive, that there is 
nothing but an idea, which may be withdrawn with- 
out warning at any moment, under the most com- 
plicated and inspiring structure. Having that fore- 
knowledge you can work with a light heart, secure 
against betrayal, ready with your own laugh when 
the mockery comes. A community finds it must 
have a bridge; Wall Street hears of it, and finances 
a contractor, who finds an architect to design it. 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 251 


An army builds it. And then this blessed old planet 
moves in its sleep, and the obstructing river flows 
another way. Well for us we can rarely see the 
beginning and the end of the work we are doing. 
Most of the men on this job have not been here 
three months. They come and shovel a little dirt, 
and die. Or they get frightened, and go. But that 
idea, that remains here, using up men and forests, 
using up all that comes within its invisible influence, 
drawing in material and pressing it into its unseen 
mould, so that out of the invisible sprouts a railway, 
projecting length by length, transmuted men and 
timber. A courtier once gave his cloak to Queen 
Elizabeth to save her feet; but what is that when 
these men give their bodies to make an easier road 
for the commerce of their fellows? They say every 
sleeper on a tropical line represents a man. The 
conquering human, who lives by dying! 

“The unseen idea remains—some stranger’s idea 
—of gain; profit out of a necessity not his, filled by 
other men unknown to him. You can’t escape it. 
First and last, it uses you. It uses you up. You 
may twist and double, but ‘when me you fly, I am 
the wings, as Emerson says. Once, once, I deliber- 
ately tried to escape from it, to get out of its range. 
I thought it was local, that idea, a mean and local 
urge. I believed I had escaped it too. I was young, 
though, then. But we all try when we’re young. 
_ There is but one way of escape—you may use up 
others; but that isn’t an easy way of escape, for 
some of us. 

“No alternative but that, and a man cannot take 


202 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


it. There you are; use, or be used. Once I thought 
I had escaped. Once upon a time, every morning 
at eight o’clock, I went to an office in Leadenhall 
Street. Know that place? My first job. I was 
one in a crowd of fifty clerks. We sat on high 
stools, facing each other across double-desks. There 
were brass rails above each desk, where we rested 
ledgers and letter baskets, Each of us marked his 
stool somewhere with a personal symbol, My own, 
my sole point of vantage there, my support in life, 
that high stool; and I would have been prepared to 
maintain it upright—following our office code of — 
honour, I as firm as may be upon it—even if, 
treacherously blabbing, I had had to deprive all 
my fellow-clerks of their supports in life. We were 
not a community, working out a common ideal, An 
idea used us. And that was a job I got as a favour, 
mark you. Some one had known my dead father. 

“IT knew the name of my boss, but that was all. 
I never spoke to him. I used to see him, a middle- 
aged man with sad eyes and a petulant mouth, clean 
shaved, and bald headed. He came in a carriage 
every morning, and went straight to a room kept 
from us by opaque glass. I used to wonder what 
he did in there. He rarely came into the office. 
When he did come into it, his was the only voice 
which ever spoke there above a whisper; a sharp, 
startling, and minatory voice. But we rarely saw 
him there. A bell would ring, a sinister summons 
on the ceiling over the desk of a principal clerk, and 
that chap would drop anything he was doing, any- 
thing, and go. I’ve seen my senior clerk, an elderly 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 253 


man in spectacles, jump as if he’d been struck when 
his bell whirred. It was such an awfully solemn 
place. Nobody ever thought of calling across that 
room, but would go round to another desk, and 
whisper. You felt you were part of a grave and 
secret plot, scribbling away to bring it to a com- 
pletion, and that all your fellow-conspirators were 
possible traitors, 

“But the plot was never complete. It went on 
and on, day after day, in an everlasting, suffocating 
sanctity, with the opaque shining glass front of the 
private room overlooking us, a luminous face en- 
tirely blank, though you knew the brain behind it 
saw everything, and was aware of all. It even 
knew old Beckwith, my senior, had got deeply into 
debt through his wife’s doctor’s bills, and had been 
fool enough to go to the moneylenders. His bell 
sprang a summons one morning; in Beckwith went; 
came out again, looking grey, poor old perisher, 
went straight to the hat rack, passed awkwardly 
through the swing doors, letting in a burst of traffic 
noise from the street, while we watched him fur- 
tively, and that was the last of Beckwith. I have 
heard our boss was a rigid moralist. He said a 
man who drank, gambled, or got into debt, not 
being able to control his own life, was no good for 
the business of another man. A system should have 
no bowels. Out the incompetent had to go. It was 
Spartan, but it paid twenty per cent., I’ve heard. 
Once we had a rebellious interruption of our sacred 
quiet, but only once. I never knew exactly why it 
was. Wehada huge factory somewhere in the Kast 


264 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


End—Cubitt Town way—and one afternoon a wo- 
man came to the counter, and asked for the cashier. 
She was so obviously Kast End, in a shawl, that the 
counter clerk was shocked at the bare idea of it. 
She kept demanding the cashier. The clerk politely, 
but nervously, because of her rising, emotional 
voice, resisted her. She began to shout. We all 
stopped to see what would happen. Shouting there! 
She was still crying out—she wanted justice for a 
daughter whose body had got into a machine, I 
think—and the cashier was forced to appear. I was 
surprised that he was so quiet with her. She was 
weeping hysterically at our polished mahogany 
counter, with its immaculate blotters, and flat, 
crystal ink-pots, where there were men in silk hats, 
looking at the unusual scene sideways and smiling. 
She could not be pacified; and suddenly she picked 
up an ink-pot, and hurled it through that frozen 
glass face of the private room. <A devastating 
crash. The shocking, raucous horror of blasphemy. 
The silence following was unendurable. We looked 
to the private door for outraged power to appear. 
Nothing happened. A policeman came and re- 
moved the woman, the cashier smiling indulgently 
at the officer, and shaking his head. ‘The system, 
after a momentary halt, moved on again, broad, 
serene, and irresistible. 

“T never catch the smell of an open Bible now but 
it conjures a picture of that arid office, angular, 
polished, and hard, where the ledgers before the 
disciplined men exude a dusty, leathery smell. But 
there I stayed for years, smelling it, and making out 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 255 


bills of lading and invoices. It was my lot. There 
was a junior who assisted me, a chap with flat, shiny 
hair parted in the middle. He had a habit of whis- 
pering about girls, when he was not whispering 
about the music hall last night, or the football next 
Saturday. When the cashier, a young man, and a 
relative of the boss, came walking down the avenue 
of desks, his sharp eyes narrowed to slits, and his 
mouth a little open, it was funny to see my junior 
put on speed, and get an intent and earnest look in 
his face. 

“When I was done for the day, I’d get my book 
out of my bag, and wonder, going home, whether 
Id ever see those places I read about, Java, India, 
and the Congo, where you went about in a white 
helmet and a white uniform, and did things in a 
large, directive way, helping Indians and niggers.to 
make something of their country. Not this niggling, 
selfish, pretty chandlery written large in stone, ma- 
hogany, and glass, disguised in magnitude and 
gravity. Cocoanut palms and forests with untold 
tales. But like the boys who found fun with the 
girls, with music halls and football, but were afraid 
of the sack. I did nothing. I was even afraid of 
the girls, 

“One day as usual I went with some of the other 
fellows to lunch, at an A.B.C. shop. We always 
went there. The girls knew us and would smile at 
our jokes. Small coffee and a scone and butter. 
My life! I found a Telegraph some one had left on 
a chair, and I read it more because I didn’t want to 
listen to that virulent abuse of our mean cashier— 


256 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


he certainly was mean—than because I wanted to’ 
read, In it, by chance, I noticed an advertisement 
for a book-keeper who would go to the tropics. 
That I noted. Of course, I stood no chance. But I 
could try. 

“That night at home I wrote an application. I 
wrote it, I think, a dozen times, till the letter was 
impeccable, a thing of beauty and precision. I felt 
this was a most momentous affair. Whether it was 
the excitement of doing something in the veritable 
direction of romance, or whether it was through 
reading ‘Waterman’s Wanderings’ I don’t know, 
but I remember a curious dream I had that night. 
I was alone in a forest which made me afraid and 
expectant. It was still and secretive. You know 
the empty stage in an unnatural, rosy light, with a 
glorified distance in which you expect a devil or a 
fairy queen to appear. There was a hammock hang- 
ing motionless from a branch. Something was in it, 
but I could not see what. That hammock was as 
st#ll as the leaves hanging over it. Then the ham- 
mock shook, and a girl rose in it and smiled at me. 
She was tiny, but adult, and her eyes were shining 
in the dusk of her hair, which fell thickly over her 
little, coffee-coloured breasts. : 

“A telegram came for me, just as I was leaving 
for the office one morning. It required me to call 
on Mr. Utah R. Brewster at the Hotel Palace, 
that very day, but at a time when I should have been 
industriously at work for another. The question 
was, should I catch that morning *bus I had never 
missed—or take all the possibilities beyond this door 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 257 


which promised to open on romance? I made up 
my mind, which went drunk with rebellion. I got 
into my seventh-day clothes. Utah R. Brewster 
and freedom! The Blackwall ’*bus—do you remem- 
ber those old hearses, with a straight companion- 
ladder to the upper deck where the outside passen- 
gers sat, knees up, back to back along the middle ?— 
well, it had to go by the office, and I was actually in 
doubt whether, aware of my unprecedented revolt, 
it would stop outside the familiar glum office and 
lawfully refuse to budge till I alighted. It went on, 
blundering past the place, all strangely unconscious 
of what it was doing, bearing me with my courage 
screwed down to bursting-point. The driver even 
said what a lovely May morning it was. 

“The Hotel Palace! I had often seen that ornate 
building when Saturday afternoon release took me 
west. Red carpeting on the steps, a glimpse of 
ferns, women all as strange as exotics going in and 
out, and between me and it a chasm which cut clear 
to the very centre of the earth. I carried my attack 
beyond the portals. It was nothing, after all. A 
flunkey put me in a chair too full of cushions to be 
easy, and I watched men and women who, at that 
time of the day, when all the folk I knew were mak- 
ing desperate and cunning efforts to keep their 
places here safe—I watched those men and women 
behaving as though all eternity were theirs, and it 
was the angels’ business to bear them up. It was as 
great a mystery to me whose every week-day morn- 
ing was the inviolate possession of another, as 
Joshua’s solar miracle. I was called, led along a 


258 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


silent corridor full of shut doors, and after a long 
walk found myself beyond all the noise of London, 
far in solitude with a man in a dressing-gown, who 
stood before a fire, working a cigar with strong, 
mobile lips. He put up a monocle, and looked at 
me shyly. Then began to walk up and down the 
hearth-rug, talking. 

“ “Well,” he said. ‘All right. I guess you'll do. 
Say, you look pretty fit. You don’t drink, eh? 
Don’t get nervous when you see the dead, huh? 
All right.’ He put his monocle*back into his eye, 
and grinned at me. I told him, in a rush, how much 
I wanted to see the tropics. He said nothing. He 
got a large blue map, intricate with white lines, and 
told me of The Company. The Job. 

“T did not fully comprehend it then. I don’t now. 
He left out too much, There was no beginning and 
noending. There was hardly amiddle. He merely 
indicated unrelated points; but at any rate the 
points were so widely sundered and so different that 
the bare indication of them conveyed a sense of an 
enormous undertaking, difficult, important, and 
necessary. Work for an army. I should be but an 
insignificant sutler in that army. But at least I 
should be one in it, one of those putting this im- 
portant affair through for future generations. ‘The 
communal idea, this. The very size of it gave me a 
sense of security. It was too broad-based to col- 
lapse. Success was inherent in its impersonal na- 
ture. A state affair. Brewster briefly mentioned 
some showy names, names of great financiers. They 
were my generals, and I should never see them. 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 259 


But their reputations were partly in my keeping. 

“Hallelujah! I had escaped. I never went back 
to the office. I never replied to its curt inquiry. 
In a week I sailed from Liverpool. Much I heard, 
on the mail boat, of The Company, this new enter- 
prise which was going to make a tropical region one 
of the richest countries in the world; develop it, 
fling its riches to all. In four weeks more I arrived 
at a small tropical island, at which I had to wait for 
The Company’s tug to take me to the mainland and 
my business. 

“There was a club-house ashore, where I stayed 
for a few days. There I met some men who had 
been working for The Company, but for incompre- 
hensible reasons were leaving this work to which I 
had come so eagerly; they were returning home. 
They were strangely pallid and limp as though the 
dark of some hot damp underground had turned 
their blood white. Their talk was drawled out, the 
weary utterance of the disillusioned who yet showed 
fateno resentment. They might have been the dead 
speaking, long untouched by any warm human 
vanity. I was really glad to get away from them. 
A tug conveyed me to the mouth of the river, up 
which I was to proceed to my station. I joined a 
shallow-draught river steamer. 

“The river, that gateway to my dream come true, 
was a narrow place, a cleit in universal trees, every 
tree the same. Mangroves, I suppose. Soon the 
forest changed, often rising on each bank to meet 
overhead. Those were uncertain places of leaves 
and dead timber, and as quiet and still as church- 


260 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


yard yews at midnight. The thumps of our paddle- 
wheels did not sound pleasant. Deeper and deeper 
we went, making turns so often that I wondered 
how we could ever be got out again. Sometimes in 
an open space we saw a flock of birds. I saw no 
other sign of life. There were no men. All my 
fellow-passengers—there were ten of us—were 
newcomers; some from the States, some from Ger- 
many, and a Frenchman. I was the only English- 
man, Each of us knew what was expected of him- 
self; none of us knew what that was which all would 
be doing. There were clerks with us, miners, civil 
engineers, timber men, and a metallurgist. We 
speculated much, were perhaps a trifle anxious, but 
reposed generally on the great idea. 

“In two hundred miles we reached a clearing. 
Why it should have been at that particular place did 
not show. But there it was, the tangible link in an 
invisible, encompassing scheme. It was my place. 
I Janded with my box. There was a white man on 
the river bank, sitting on a sea-chest, his head in his 
hands. He looked up. “You the victim” he said. 
“Well, there you are—sweeping a lazy arm round 
the small enclosed ground—‘that’s your job. 
There’s your store. ‘There’s your house. That’s 
_ where the niggers live.’ 

““Pedro!’ he called. A copper-coloured native, 
in shorts and a wide grass hat, loafed over to us. 
“This is your servant,’ he said. ‘He’s a bit mad, but 
he’s not a fool. He’s all right. Keep your eye on 
the niggers though, They are fools, and they’re not 
mad. You'll find the inventory and the accounts 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 261 


in the desk in your hut. The quinine’s there too. 
Take these keys. Oh, the mosquito curtain’s got 
holes in it. See you mend it. I couldn’t. Had 
the shakes too bad. Cheer up!’ 

“He went aboard. The steamer saluted me with 
its whistle, turned a corner, and the sound of its 
paddles diminished, died. I seemed to concentrate, 
as though I had never known myself till that instant 
when the sound of the steamer failed, when the last 
connection with busy outer life was gone. I could 
smell something like stephanotis. In that dead 
silence my hearing was so acute that I caught a faint 
rustling, which I thought might be the sound of 
things growing. I turned and went to my hut, sad 
Pedro following with my box. The cheap American 
clock in the hut made a terrific noise, filling the 
afternoon with its rapid and ridiculous beat, trying 
to recall to me that time still was moving quickly, 
when it was quite evident that time had now come 
for me to an absolute stand in a broad-glowing 
noon. I sat surveying things from a chair. Then 
leisurely took my envelope and read my instructions 
—how I was to receive and take charge of shovels, 
lanterns, machinery parts, railway metals, soap, 
cooking utensils, axes, pumps, and so on, which con- 
signments I must divide and parcel according to di- 
rections to come, marking each consignment for its 
own destination. The names of a hundred destina- 
tions I should hear about in my future work were 
given. They were names meaning nothing to me. 
Then followed some brief rules for a novice in the 
governing of men. Through all the rules ran an 


262 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


incongruous note for such a place as that, a remi- 
niscence of Leadenhall Street and its miserable 
whine. Yet it hardly disturbed me. I sat and 
thought over this expansion of my life. A melan- 
choly bird called in two notes at intervals. The 
leaves which formed the thatch of my hut hung a 
long coarse black fringe at the door. My walls 
were of leaves, and the floor a raft of small logs, 
still with the bark on, just clear of the ground. 
The sunlight came through one dark wall, studding 
it with sparks. No. That dubious and familiar note 
in the instructions was nothing. I was clear be- 
yond all that now—all those occasions for carking 
anxiety which deprave the worker, and make him 
hate the task to which whipping necessity drives 
“him. The domineering manner of my instructions, 
the fretfulness of the old correspondence I found 
carelessly scattered about, addressed to my prede- 
cessor, was the illusion. ‘The forest behind the hut, 
the black river, the quiet, the insects, the foreign 
smell, the puzzling men, my men to command, who 
kept passing without in the violent light, they were 
not from books any more, they made evidence direct 
to my own senses now. I was authority and provi- 
dence, moulding and protecting as I thought right. 
This place should be kept reasonable, four square, 
my plot of earth to be clean and unashamed, frankly 
open to the eye of the sky. I would see what I 
could do; and I would start now. I laughed at 
authority—all I could see of it——reflected in a frag- 
ment of mirror kept to a door tree by nail heads; the 
funny hat and the shirt which did not matter, bad 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 263 


as it was, for I was authority there by every reason 
of that white shirt; and the beard which was coming. 
Latitude, my boy, latitude! I strolled out to sur- 
vey my little world. 

“Of the weeks that followed, nothing comes back 
so strongly as some quite irrelevant incidents. A 
tiger I saw one morning, swimming the river. 
Pedro, insensible for two days with fever; and 
death, which came to over-rule my viceroy author- 
ity. The first blow! There was a flock of parrots 
which visited us one day, and it surprised me that 
the men should regard them merely as food. But 
there was work to be done, and in a definite way; 
but why we did it—and I know we did it well—and 
how it joined up with the Job, I could not see. That 
was not my affair. There was the inventory to be 
checked, for one thing, and vefore I was through 
with it the work had fairly imprisoned me, and the 
new romantic circumstances became blurred and 
over written. That inventory was so extravagantly 
‘wrong that in a week I was going about heated and 
swearing at the least provocation. It was fraudu- 
lent, There was a sporadic disorder of goods irre- 
concilable with their neat records, though each rec- 
ord bore the signs and counter-signs of Heaven 
knows how many departments of the Company. 
All an inextricable welter of calm errors, neatly 
initialled by unknown fools. 

“Every few days a steamer of the Company 
- would call, loaded with more goods, or would come 
down river to me to take goods away. The con- 
fusion grew and interpenetrated, till I felt that 


264 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE. 


nothing but dumping all that was there into the 
river, and beginning again with a virgin station, 
would ever clear the muddle. The place grew mad- 
dening through ridiculous blundering from outside. 
I had six men to attend to, all with temperatures 
and all useless. The arrears of accounts, my work 
on sweltering nights while the very niggers slept, 
the arrears grew. A steam-shovel came, without its 
shovel, and not all my written protests to headquar- 
ters could complete that irrational creature bying in 
sections rotting in sun and rain, minus the very 
reason for its existence, an impediment to us and an 
irritation. Constant urgent orders came to me from 
up country to ship there this abortion. I declined, 
in the name of sanity. There followed peremptory 
demands for a complete steam-shovel, violent with 
animosity for me, the unknown idiot who obstinate- 
ly refused to let a steam-shovel go, just as though I 
was in love with the damned thing, and could not 
part with it. But I understood those letters, They 
were from chaps, irritated, like myself, by all this 
awful tomfoolery. And from headquarters came 
other letters, shot with a curt note of innocent inso- 
lence, asking whether I was asleep there, or dead, 
and adding, once, that if I could not keep up com- 
munications better I had better make way for one 
who could. There were plenty who could do it. 
Pleasant, wasn’t it? They complained querulously 
of my accounts, almost insinuating that I debited 
more wages to the Company than I credited to the 
men. I had too many sick men, they said. Did I 
pamper them? And again, I had too many who 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 265 


died; I must take care; they did not want the local 
government to get alarmed. 

“The time came when I got amusement out of 
those letters from headquarters; for their faults 
were so plain that I conceived the headquarters 
staff having much time to spend, and a sort of in- 
struction at large to administer ginger to men, like 
myself, on the spot, on general principles, so to keep 
us not only alive, but brisk and anxious; and doing 
it with the inconsequential abandon of little children 
playing with sharp knives. I got comfort from that 
view; and when I looked round my placid domain 
where my men, with whom I was on good terms, 
laboured easily and rightly under the still woods, I 
told myself I was still fretting because the business 
was new, that things would come easier soon. But 
at night I felt I was anxious exactly because it was 
all so old and familiar to me. 

“One day, having given a group of men at work 
in a distant corner of the clearing some advice, I 
noticed a little path enter the wood beside a big 
tree. I had never been into the forest. To tell the 
truth, Thad had no time. The trees stood round us, 
keeping us from—what? I had always felt a little 
doubt of what was there and could not be seen. I 
turned inwards. I found myself at once in a cool 
gloom. I went on curiously, peering each side into 
those shadows, where nothing moved, and in an 
hour came to another clearing, smaller than my 
own, and with no river in view. By the sun, which 
_ now I saw again, this place was north of our station. 
The opening was being rapidly choked by a new 


266 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


growth. I was turning for home again, for the 
afternoon was late, when I saw a hammock slung 
between two saplings beside a dismantled hut. I 
could just see the hammock and hut through the 
scrub. I went over there, and was so carefully look- 
ing for snakes and beastly things in the bush that I 
had arrived before I knew it. The hut had been 
long abandoned. The hammock had something in 
it, and I was turning something in my mind as I 
went up to it. There were some ragged clothes in 
the bottom of it, partly covering bones, and among 
the rags was a globe of black hair. 

“Next morning I woke late, feeling I had gone 
wrong. My hands were yellow and my finger nails 
blue, and I was shaking with cold. But the tootling 
of an up-coming steamer forced me to business. 
The steamer was towing six lighters, filled with 
labourers. ‘They were Poles, I think. Afterwards, 
I learned, some hundreds of these men had been 
collected for us somewhere by a clever, business-like 
recruiting agent, who promised each poor wretch a 
profitable time in the Garden of Eden. My re- 
sponsibility, thirty of them, was landed. They 
stood by the river, gaping about them, wondering, 
some alarmed, more of them angry, most clad in 
stuffy woollens, poor souls. Having the fever, I 
was hot very interested. I told my negro foreman 
to find them shelter and to put them to work. We 
were making our clearing larger, and were building 
more store-houses. 

“Something like the pale morning light which 
wakens you, weary from a fitful sleep, to the clear 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 267, 


apprehension again of an urgent trouble which has 
filled the night with dreams, I came through each 
bout of fever to know there was really trouble out- 
side with the new men. Daily I had to crawl about, 
shivering, my head dizzy with quinine, till the fever 
came near its height, when I got into my hammock, 
and would lie there, waiting, burning and dry, trem- 
ulous with an anxiety I could not shape. Some- 
times then I saw my big negro foreman come to the 
door, look at me, as though wishing to say some- 
thing, but leave, reluctantly, when I motioned him 
away. 

“One morning I was better, but hardly able to 
walk, when shouts and a running fight, which I 
could see through the door, showed me the Poles had 
mutinied. There was a hustling gang of them out- 
side my door, filling it with haggard, furious faces. 
I could not understand them, but one presently be- 
gan to shout in French. They refused to work. 
The food was bad. ‘They wanted meat. They 
wanted their contracts fulfilled. ‘They wanted 
bread, clothes, money, passages out of the country. 
They had been fooled and swindled. They were 
dying. I argued plaintively with that man, but it 
made him shout and gesticulate. At that the voices 
of all rose in a passionate tumult, knives and axes 
flourishing in the sunlight. In a sudden cold feroc- 
ity, not knowing what I was doing, I picked up my 
empty gun—I had no ammunition—and moved 
down on them. They held for a moment, then broke 
ground, and walked away quickly, looking back 
with fear and malice. Next day they had gone. 


268 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


Yes, actually. The poor devils. They had gone, 
with the exception of a few with the fever. ‘They 
had taken to that darkness around us, to find a way 
to the coast. Talk of the babes in the wood! The 
men had no food, no guide, and had they known the 
right direction they could not have followed it. If 
the Company did not take you out of that land, 
you stayed there; and if the Company did not feed 
you there, you died. No creature could leave that 
clearing, and survive, unless I willed it. The forest 
and the river kept my men together as effectively as 
though they were marooned without a boat on a 
deep-sea island. ‘Those men were never heard of 
again. Nobody was to blame. Whom could you 
blame? The Company did not desire their death. 
Simply, not knowing what they were doing, those 
poor fellows walked into the invisibly moving ma- 
chinery of the Job, not knowing it was there, and 
were mutilated. 

“We had news of the same trouble with the Poles 
up river. Some of the mutineers tried to get to 
the sea on rafts. Such amazing courage was but 
desperation and a complete ignorance of the place 
they were in. One such raft did pass our place. 
Some of them were prone on it, others squatting; 
one man got on his feet as the raft swung by our 
clearing, and emptied his revolver into us. A few 
days later another raft floated by, close in, with six 
men lying upon it. They were headless. Some- 
where, the savages had caught them asleep. 

“No. I was not affected as much as you might . 
think. I began to look upon it all with insensitive 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 269 


serenity. I was getting like the men I met on the 
islands, months before. I saw us all caught by some- 
thing huge and hungry, a viewless, impartial appe- 
tite which swallowed us all without examination; 
which was slowly eating me. I began to feel I 
should never leave that place, and did not care. 
Why should others want to leave it, then? Often, 
through weakness, the trees around us seemed to me 
to sway, to be veiled in a thin mist. The heat did 
not weigh on my skin, but on my dry bones. I was 
parched body and mind, and when the men came 
with their grievances I felt I could shoot any of 
them, for very weariness, to escape argument. The 
insolence from headquarters I filed for reference no 
longer, but lit my pipe with it. But the correspond- 
ence ceased at length, and because now I was cal- 
lous to it, I failed to notice it had stopped. 

“Some vessels passed down river, coming sud- 
denly to view, a rush of paddles, and were gone, 
tootling their whistles. The work went on, me- 
chanically. The clearing grew. The sheds spread 
one by one. The inventory was kept, the accounts 
were dealt with. There came a time when I was 
forced to remember that the steamer had not called 
for ten days. We were running short of food. I 
had a number of sick, but no quinine. The men, 
those quick, faithful fellows with the dog-like, pa- 
tient eyes, they looked to me, and I was going to 
failthem. I made pills of flour to look like quinine, 
for the fever patients, trying to cure them by faith. 
I wrote a report to headquarters, which I knew 
would get me my discharge; I was not polite. 


4 


270 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


There was no meat. We tried dough fried in lard. 
When I think of the dumb patience of those black 
fellows in their endurance for an idea of which they 
knew nothing, I am amazed at the docility and kind- 
ness inherent in common men. They will give their 
lives for nothing, if you don’t tell them to do it, but 
only let them trust you to take them to the sacrifice 
they know nothing about. 

“That went on for a month. We were in rags. 
We were starved. We were scarecrows. No 
steamer had been by the place, from either direc- 
tion, for a month. Then a vessel came. I did not 
know the chap in charge. He seemed surprised to 
see us there. He opened his eyes at our gaunt crew 
of survivors, shocked. ‘Then he spoke. 

“Don’t you know?’ he asked. 

“Even that ridiculous question had no effect on 
me. I merely eyed him. I was reduced to an im- 
potent, dumb query. I suppose I was like Jack 
the foreman, a gaping, silent, pathetic interroga- 
tion. At last I spoke, and my voice sounded miles 
away. ‘Well, what do you want here” 

** *T’ve come for that steam shovel. I’ve bought it.’ 

“The man was mad. My sick men wanted physic. 
We all wanted food. But this stranger had come to 
us just to take away our useless steam shovel. ‘I 
thought you knew,’ he said. “The Company’s 
bought out. Some syndicate’s bought ’em out. A 
month ago. Thought the Company would be too 
successful. Spoil some other place. 'There’s no 
Company now. They’re selling off. What about 
that steam shovel?’ ”’ 


V 


WE had 5200 tons of cargo, and nearly all of it was 
patent fuel. This was to be put into baskets, hauled 
up, and emptied into railway trucks run out on the 
jetty alongside. We watched the men at work for 
a few days and nights, and judged we should be at 
Porto Velho for a month. I saw for myself long 
rambles in the forest during that time of golden 
leisure, but saw them no more after the first at- 
tempt. The clearing on its north side rose steeply 
to about a hundred feet on the hard red conglomer- 
ate; to the south, on the San Antonio side, it ended 
inacreek andaswamp. But at whatever point the 
Doctor and I attempted to leave the clearing we 
soon found ourselves stopped by a dense under- 
growth, At a few places there were narrow foot- 
paths, subterranean in the quality of their light, 
made by timbermen when searching for suitable 
trees for the saw-mill. These tracks never pene- 
trated more than a few hundred yards, and always 
ended in a well of sunshine in the forest where some 
big trees would be prone in a tangle of splintered 
branches, and a deep litter of leaves and broken 
fronds. And that was as far as man had got in- 
wards from the east bank of the Madeirariver. Be- 
yond it was the undiscovered, and the Araras In- 
dians. Qn the other side of the river the difficulty 


was the same. The Rio Purus, the next tributary 
271 


272 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


of the Amazon westward from the Madeira, had its 
course, it was guessed, perhaps not more than fifty 
miles across country from the river bank opposite 
Porto Velho; but no one yet has made a traverse 
of the land between the two streams. The dark 
secrecy of the region was even oppressive. Some- 
times when venturing alone a little beyond a foot- 
path, out of hearing of the settlement, surrounded 
by the dim tangle in which there was not a move- 
ment or a sound, I have become suspicious that the 
shapes about me in the half light were all that was 
real there, and Porto Velho and its men an illusion, 
and there has been a touch of panic in my haste to 
find the trail again, and to prove that it could take 
me to an open prospect of sunny things with the 
solid “Capella” in their midst. 

We carried our butterfly nets ashore and went of 
a morning across the settlement, choosing one of 
the paths which ended in a small forest opening, 
where there was sunlight as well as shadow. Few 
butterflies came to such places. You could really 
think the forest was untenanted. A tanager would 
dart a ray of metallic sheen in the wreckage of tim- 
ber and dead branches about us, or some creature 
would call briefly, melancholy wise, in the woods. 
Very rarely an animal would go with an explosive 
rush through the leaves. But movements and sounds, 
except the sound of our own voices, were surprises; 
and a sight of one of the larger inhabitants of the 
jungle is such a rarity that we knew we might be 
there for years and never get it. Yet life about its 
various business in the woods kept us interested 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 273 


till the declining sun said it was time to get aboard 
again. Every foot of earth, the rotting wood, the 
bark of the standing trees, every pool, and the litter 
of dead leaves and husks, were populous when close- 
ly regarded. Most of the trees had smooth barks. 
A corrugated trunk, like that of our elm, was ex- 
ceptional. But when a bole had a rough surface it 
would be masked by the grey tenacious webbing of 
spiders; on one such tree we found a small mantis, 
which so mimicked the spiders that we were long 
in discovering what it really was. Many of the 
smooth tree trunks were striated laterally with lines 
of dry mud. These lines were actually tunnels, 
covered ways for certain ants. The corridors of this 
limitless mansion had many such surprises. There 
were the sauba ants; they might engross all a man’s 
hours, for in watching them he could easily forget 
there were other things in the world. They would 
move over the ground in an interminable procession. 
Looked at quickly, that column of fluid life seemed 
a narrow brook, its surface smothered with green 
leaves, which it carried, not round or under obstruc- © 
tions, but upwards and over them. Nearly every 
tiny creature in that stream of life held upright in 
its Jaws a banner, much larger than itself, cut from 
a fresh leaf. It bore its banner along hurriedly and 
resolutely. All the ants carrying leaves moved in 
one direction., The flickering and forward move- 
ment of so many leaves gave the procession of ants 
the wavering appearance of shallow water running 
unevenly. On both sides of the column other ants 
hurried in the reverse direction, often stopping 


¥ 
274. THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


to communicate something, with their antenne, to 
their burdened fellows. ‘Two ants would stop 
momentarily, and there would be a swift intimation, 
and then away they would go again on their urgent 
affairs. We would see rapid conversations of that 
kind everywhere in the host. Other ants, with larger 
heads, kept moving hither and thither about the 
main body; having an eye on matters generally, I 
suppose, policing or superintending them. There 
was no doubt all those little fellows had a common 
purpose. ‘There was no doubt they had made up 
their minds about it long since, had come to a de- 
cision communally, and that each of them knew his 
job and meant to get it done. There did not appear 
to be any ant favoured by the god of the ants. You 
have to cut your own leaf and get along with it, if 
you are a sauba. 

There they were, flowing at our feet. I see it 
now, one of those restricted forest openings to which - 
we often went, the wall of the jungle all round, and 
some small attalea palms left standing, the green of 
their long plumes as hard and bright as though var- 
nished. Nothing else is there that is green, except 
the weeds which came when the sunlight was let in 
by the axe. The spindly forest columns rise about, 
pallid in a wall of gloom, draped with withered stuff 
and dead cordage. Their far foliage is black and 
undistinguishable against the irregular patch of 
overhead blue. It never ceased to be remarkable 
that so little that was green was there. The few 
pothos plants, their shapely parasitic foliage sit- 
ting like decorative nests in some boughs half-way 


# 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 275 


to the sky, would be strangely conspicuous and ~ 
bright. ‘The only leaves of the forest near us were 
on the ground, brown parchments all of one simple © 
shape, that of the leaf of the laurel. I remember a 
stagnant pool there, and over it suspended some 
enamelled dragon-flies, their wings vibrating so 
rapidly that the flies were like rubies shining in 
obscure nebule, When we moved, the nymphs van- 
ished, just as if a light flashed out. We sat down 
again on our felled tree to watch, and magically 
they reappeared in the same place, as though their 
apparition depended on the angle and distance of 
the eye. When a bird called one started involun- 
tarily, for the air was so muffled and heavy that it 
was strange to find it open instantly to let free the 
delicate sibilation. 

In the low ground beyond Porto Velho up stream 
there was another place in the forest where some- 
times we would go, the approach to it being through 
a deep cutting made by the railwaymen in the clay. 
This clay, a stiff homogeneous mass mottled rose 
and white, was saturated with moisture, and the 
helicon butterflies frequented it, probably because it 
was damp; and a sight of their black and yellow, or 
black and crimson wings, spread on the clean plane 
of the beautifully tinted rock, was far better than 
putting them in the collecting box. The helicons 
are bold insects, and did not seem to mind our close 
inspecting eyes. Beyond the cutting was a long 
narrow clearing, with a giant silk cotton tree, a 
province in itself, on the edge of the forest. Look- 
ing straight upward we could see its foliage, but so 


276 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


far away was the spreading canopy of leaves that it 
was only a black cloud, the outermost sprays mere 
wisps of dark vapour melting in the intense bright- — 
ness of the sky. The smooth grey trunk was heavily 
buttressed, the “sapeomas” (literally, flat roots) 
ascending the bole for more than fifty feet, and 
radiating in walls about the base of the tree; the 
compartments were so large that they could have 
been used as stabling for four or five horses. From 
its upper limbs a wreckage of lianas hung to the 
ground. Beyond this giant the path rose to a place 
where the clearing was already waist high with 
scrub. Then it descended again to the woods. But 
the woods there were flooded. That was my first 
near view of the igapo. We had approached the 
trees, for they seemed free of the usual under- 
growth, and passed into the sombre colonnades. 
The way appeared clear enough, and we thought we 
could move ahead freely at last, but found in a few 
steps the bare floor was really black water. The 
base of the forest was submerged, the columns which 
supported the unseen roof, through which came lit- 
tle light, diminished down soundless distance into 
night. After the flaming day from which we had 
just come this darkness was repellant. ‘The forest, 
that austere, stately and regarding Presence draped 
interminably in verdant folds, while we gazed upon 
it suspecting no new thing of it, as by a stealthy — 
movement had withdrawn its green robe, and our 
sight had fallen into the cavernous gloom of its dank 
and hollow heart. 

It was about the little wooden town itself, where 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 277 


the scarified earth was already sparsely mantled 
with shrubs, flowering vines, and weeds, and where 
the burnt tree stumps, and even the door posts in 
some cases, were freshly budding—life insurgent, 
beaten down by fire and sword, but never to its 
source and copious springs—that most of the but- 
terflies were to be found. Ina land where blossoms 
were few, these were the winged flowers. About the 
squalid wooden barracks of the negro and native la- 
bourers, which were built off the ground to allow 
of ventilation, and had a trench round them foul 
with drainage and evil with smells, a Colcenis, a 
scarlet butterfly with narrow, swallow-like wings, 
used to flash, and frequently would settle there. 
Over the flowering weeds on the waste ground there 
would be, in the morning hours, or when’the sky was 
overcast, glittering clouds of the smaller and duller 
species, though among them now and then would 
stoop a very emperor of butterflies, a being quick 
and unbelievably beautiful to temperate eyes. 
After midday, when the sun was intense, the but- 
terflies became scarce. When out of the shade of 
the woods, and stranded, at that time, in the hope- 
less heat of the bare settlement, we could turn into 
one of the houses of the officials of the company for 
shelter. ‘These also were of timber, cool, with a 
verandah that was a cage of fine copper gauze to 
keep out the insects. All the doors were self-clos-. 
ing. The fewest chances were offered to the mos- 
quitoes. There was no glass, for the window open- 
ings also were covered with copper mesh. Here we 
could sit in shaded security, in lazy chairs, and look 


278 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


out over the clearing to the river below, and to the 
level line of forest across the river, while listening 
to stories which had come down to Porto Velho from 
the interior, brought by the returning pioneers. 

Porto Velho had a population of about three 
hundred. There were Americans, Germans, Eng- 
lish, Brazilians, a few Frenchmen, Portuguese, 
some Spaniards, and a crowd of negroes and 
negresses. ‘There was but one white woman in the 
settlement. J was told the climate seemed to poison 
them. The white girl, who persisted in staying in 
spite of warnings from the doctors, was herself a 
Brazilian, the wife of one of the labourers. She re- 
fused to leave, and sometimes I saw her about, 
petite, frail, looking very sad. But her husband 
was earning good money. It was a busy place, 
most of it being workshops, stores, and offices, with 
an engine and trucks jangling inconsequentially on 
the track by the shore. The line crossed a creek 
by a trestle bridge, and disappeared in the forest 
in the direction of San Antonio. The hospital for 
the men was nearly two miles up the track. 

It was along the railway track towards the hos- 


pital, with the woods to the left, and a short margin ~ 
of scrub and forest, and then the river, on the right — 
hand, that I saw one morning in sauntering a few — 
miles as many butterflies as there are flowers in an ~ 
English garden in June. They were the blossoms — 


of the place. ‘The track was bright with them. 


They settled on the hot metals and ties, clustered 


thickly round muddy pools, a plantation there as — 


3 


vivid and alive, in the quick movements of their © 


SS | ae 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 279 


wings, as though a wind shook the petals of a bed 
of flowers. They flashed by like birds. One would 
soar slowly, wings outspread and stable, a living 
plane of metallic green and black. There was a 
large and insolent beauty—he did not move from 
his drink at a puddle though my boot almost 
touched him—his wings a velvety black with crim- 
son eyes on the underwings, and I caught him; 
but I was so astonished by the strength of his con- 
vulsive body in the net that I let him go. Near the 
hospital some bushes were covered with minute 
flowers, and seen from a distance the countless in- 
sects moving about those bushes were a glistening 
and puzzling haze. 

All that morning I had felt the power of the 
torrid sun, which clung to the body lke invisible 
bonds, and made one’s movements slow, was a lusci- 
ous benefit, a golden bath, a softening and genera- 
tive balm; a mother heat and light whose ardent 
virtues stained pinions crimson and cobalt, and 
made bodies strong and convulsive, and caused the 
earth to burst with rushing sap, to send up green 
fountains; for so the palms, which showed every- 
where in the woods, looked to me. You could hear 
the incessant low murmur of multitudinous wings. 
And I had been warned to beware of all things. I 
felt instead that I could live and grow for ever 
in such a land. 

Presently, becoming a little weary of so much 
strong light, I found it was midday, and looking 
back, there was the ship across a curve of the river. 
It was two good miles away; two intense, shade- 


280 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


less, silent afternoon miles. I began the return 
journey. An increasing rumbling sound ahead 
made me look up, as I stepped from tie to tie, and 
there came at me a trolley car, pumped along slow- 
ly, four brown bodies rising and falling rhythmi- 
cally over its handle. A man in a white suit was 
its passenger. As it passed me I saw it bore also 
something under a white cloth; the cloth moulded 
a childish figure, of which only the hem of a skirt 
and the neat little booted feet showed beyond the 
cloth, and the feet swayed limply with the jolts of 
the car in a way curiously appealing and woful. 
The car stopped, and the white man, a cheerful 
young doctor chewing an extinct cigar, came to me 
for a light. He stood to gossip for a few minutes, 
giving his men a rest. “That’s the Brazilian girl,” 
he said; “she wouldn’t go home when told, poor 
thing.” 

This Madeira river had the look of very adven- 
turous fishing, and the Doctor had brought with him 
an assortment of tackle. The water was opaque, 
and it was deep. Its prospects, though the forest 
closed round us, were spacious. It flowed silently, 
with great power, and its surface was often coiled 
by profound movements. The coils of the river, as 
we were looking over the side one morning, began 
to move in our minds also, and the Doctor men- 
tioned his tackle. There was the forest enclosing 


us, as mute as the water, its bare roots clenched in 


aqueous earth. Nobody could tell us much about 
the fish in this river, but we heard stories of crea- 


eee 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 281 


tures partly seen. There was one story of a thing 
taken from the very place in the river where we 
were anchored, a fish in armour which the natives 
declared was new to them; a fearful ganoid I 
guessed it, reconstructing it in vision from frag- 
ments of various tales about it, such as is pictured 
in a book on primeval rocks. There were alliga- 
tors, too, and there was the sucuruju, which I could 
call the great water serpent, only the Indian name 
sounds so much more right and awful; and that 
fellow is forty feet long in his legend, but spoils a 
good story, through reducing himself by half when 
he is actually killed. Still, twenty feet of stout 
snake is enough for trouble. I saw one, just after 
it was killed, which was twenty-two feet in length, 
and was three feet round its middle. So to fish in 
the Madeira was as if one’s hook and line were cast 
into the deeps where forms that are without name 
stir in the dark of dreams. We got out our tackle, 
and the cook had an assortment of stuff he did not 
want, and that we put on the hooks, and waited, 
our lines carried astern by the current, for signals 
from the unknown. Yet excepting for a few cat- 
fish, nothing interrupted the placid flow of stream 
and time. The Doctor put a bight of the lime round 
his wrist, sat down, and slept. We had fine after- 
noons, broad with the wealth of our own time. 
Old man Jim came aboard and saw our patience 
with amusement. He suggested dynamite, and no 
waiting. The river was full of good fish, and he 
would come next day with a canoe and take us 
where we could get a load. It was a suggestion 


282 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


which needed slurring, to look attractive to sports- 
men. Jim took it for granted that we simply 
wanted fish to eat, and as many as we could get; 
and next morning there he was alongside with his 
big boat and its crew. Jim himself was in the stern, 
the navigator, and he was sitting on what I was told 
was a box of dynamite. Now, there were two others 
of our company who, but the day before, were even 
eager to see what dynamite would send up from the 
bottom of that river; but when they saw the craft 
alongside with its wild-looking crew, and Jim with 
his rifle sitting on a power which could lift St. 
Paul’s, they considered everything, and decided 
they could not go that day. I went alone. 

I suppose men do plucky things because they are 
largely thoughtless of the danger of the things they 
do. As soon as I was sitting on the level of the 
water in that crazy boat, with Jim and his explosive, 
and beside him what whisky he had not already 
consumed, and saw under my nose the eddies and 
upheavals of the current, I knew I was doing a very 
plucky thing indeed, and wished I was high and 
safe on the “Capella.” But we had pushed off. 

Jim, with his eyes dreamy through barley juice, 
was the pilot, and there was a measure of confidence 
to be got from the way he navigated us past the 
charging trees afloat. There was no drink in the 
steering paddle, at least. But the shore was a long 
swim away; yet perhaps it would have been as 
pleasant to be drowned or blown-up as to be lost in 
the jungle. We turned into a still creek, where the 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 283 


trees met overhead. Jim continued his course till 
the inundated forest was about us. The gloom 
was hollow, the pillars rising from the black floor 
were spectral, and our voices and paddles sounded 
like a noisy irruption among the aisles of a temple. 
The echoes fled from us deeper into the dark. But 
Jim was all unconscious of this; he but stopped our 
progress, and opened the box of cartridges. 

I had never seen dynamite, but only heard of it. 
I understood it had unexpected qualities. Jim had 
a cartridge in his hand, and was digging a knife into 
it. I repeat, the flooded wilderness was round 
us, and below was the black deep. Jim fitted a 
detonator to a length of fuse, and stuck it in the 
cartridge. He was in no hurry. He stopped now 
and then for another drink. Having got the car- 
tridge ready, with its potent filament, he tied four 
more cartridges round it. I put these things down 
simply, but my hand ached with the way I gripped 
the gunwale, and I could hear myself breathing. 

Then Jim struck a match on his breeches, with all 
the fumbling deliberation of the fully ripe—brush- 
ing the vine leaves from his eyes the better to see 
what he was doing—and he lit the fuse, after it had 
twice dodged the match. It fizzed. The splutter 
worked downwards energetically. Jim did not 
deign to look at it, though it fascinated me. He 
slowly scratched his back with his disengaged hand, 
and gazed absently into the forest. 

The spark and its spurts of smoke were now near 
the bottom. Jim changed the menace into his right 


284. THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


hand, in order to reach another part of his back 
with his leisurely left. His eyes were still on the 
forest. I kept swallowing. 

“Jim,” I said eagerly—though I did not know I 


was going to speak—“don’t—don’t you think you’d’ 


better throw it away now?” 

He regarded me steadily, with eyes half shut. 
The spark spurted, and dropped another inch. He 
looked at it. He looked round the waters without 
haste. ‘Then, and I could have cried aloud, he 
threw the shocking handful away from us. | 

It sank. There were a few bubbles, and we sat 
regarding each other in the quiet of a time which 
had been long dead, waiting for something to hap- 
pen in atime tocome. At the end of two weeks the 
bottom of the river fell out, with the noise of the 
collapse of an iron foundry on a Sunday. Our boat 
tried to leap upwards, but failed. The water did 
not burst asunder. It vibrated, and was then con- 
vulsed. | 

Dead fish appeared everywhere, patches of white 
all round; but we hardly saw them. There was a 
great head which emerged from the floor, looking 
upwards sleepily, and two hands moved slowly. 
These quietly sank again. The tail of the saurean 
appeared, slowly described a half circle, and went. 
The big alligator then lifted itself, and performed 
some grotesque antics with deliberation and gravity. 
Then it gathered speed. It rotated, thrashed, and 
drummed. It did all that a ten-horse-power maniac 
might. I think the natives shrieked. I think Jim 
kept saying “hell”; for I was conscious only with 


SS ee — 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 285 


my eyes. When the dizzy reptile recovered, it shot 
away among the trees like a torpedo. 

We went home. That night I understand the. 
second mate was kept awake listening to me, as I 
slept, bursting into spasms of dreadful merriment. 

When you are lost in the map of a country that 
is beyond the worn routes, trying to discover there- 
in the place name which is the most secluded and in- 
accessible, if the map should happen to be that of 
South America, then your thought would naturally 
wander to the neighbourhood of San Antonio of the - 
Rio Madeira. There you stay, to wonder what 
strange people and rocks and trees are to be found 
at San Antonio. It looks remote, even on the map. 
The sign which stands for the village is caught in 
a central loop of the mesh which is the river system 
of the Amazon forest. San Antonio must be be- 
yond all, and a great journey. It is far outside the 
radius. And that would be enough, to be beyond 
the last ripple of the traffic and at peace, where that 
dark disquiet, that sombre emanation which rises 
from the soured earth where myriads have their 
chimneys, their troubles and their strife, staining 
even the morning and the morning thought, is no 
more. A place where the light has the clarity of 
the first dawn, and one might hear, while sure of 
absolute solitude, the winding of a strange horn, 
and suspect, when coming to an opening in the 
woods, the flight of a shining one; for somewhere 
the ancient gods must have sanctuary. <A land 
where the rocks have the moss of unvisited fast- 


286 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


nesses, and you can snuff the scents of original 
day. 

Where we were anchored, San Antonio was in 
view, about five miles up stream. Where at the 
end of that reach of river a line of tremulous light, 
which we thought was the cataracts, bridged the 
converging palisades of the jungle, in the trees of 
the right bank it was sometimes easy to believe 
there was a glint of white buildings. But looking 
again, to reassure your sight, the apparition of 
dwellings vanished. At night, in the quiet, some- 
times the ears could detect the shudder of the 
weighty rapids by San Antonio; but it was merely 
a tremor felt; there was no sound. The village 
remained to us for some time just that uncertain 
gleam by day, and the rapids but a minute reduc- 
tion of a turmoil that was far. For in that languor- 
ous heat we counted miles differently, and it was 
pleasanter to suspect than to go and prove, and 
much easier. 

One day I went. When in a small boat the 
jungle towered. ‘The river, too, had a different 
character. From the shore, or from the big “Ca- 
pella,” the river was an expanse of light, an im- 
pression of shining peace. Whenever you got close 
to its surface it became alive and menacingly inti- 
mate. Our little boat seemed to roll in the powerful 
folds of a monster which wallowed ponderously 
and without ceasing. The trees afloat, charging 
down swiftly and in what one felt was an ominous 
quiet, stood well above our tiny craft. 

We steered close in-shore to avoid the drifting 


a 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 287 


wood and the set of the current. The jungle’s 
sheer height, confusion, and intensity were more 
awesome than when seen from the steamer. Not 
many of the trees were of great beam, but their 
consistent height, with the lianas in a wreck from 
the far overhanging cornice, dwarfed our boat to 
an unimportant straw. At times the forest had a 
selvage of cane, and growths of arrow grass, bear- 
ing long white plumes twelve feet above us, and a 
pair of fan-shaped leaves resembling palm leaves, 

The sound of the cataracts increased, and a bar- 
rier grew in height athwart the Madeira. Mount- 
ing high right ahead of us at last was a mass of 
granite boulders, with broad smooth surfaces, hav- 
ing the structure of gigantic masonry in ruin which 
weathered plutonic rock so often assumes. Be- 
yond the barrier the river was plainly above our 
level. It was seen, resplendent as quicksilver, 
through the crenellations of the black rocks. One 
central mass of rock, higher than the rest, had a 
crown of dark and individual palms, standing para- 
mount in the upper light. Yet, with that gleam of 
wide river behind, no great rush of water broke 
there. A few fountains spurted, apparently with- 
out source, and collapsed, and pulsed again. The 
white runnels of foam which laced the contours of 
the piled boulders gave the barrier the appearance 
of being miraculously uplifted, as though one saw 
thin daylight through its interstices. Not till the 
village was in view did we see where the main river 
avoided the barrier. The course here was looped. 
Above the barrier the river turned from the right 


588 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


bank, and heaped itself in a smooth steep glide 
through a narrow pass against the opposite shore, 
the roaring welter then running obliquely across 
the foot of the rocks to the front of San Antonio 
on the right bank again. The forest beside the falls 
seemed to be tremulous with continuous and pro- 
found underground thunder. 

The little huddle of San Antonio’s white houses 
is on slightly rising ground, and the lambent green 
of the jungle is beside them and over them. The 
foliage presses the village down to the river. Like 
every Amazonian town and village, it appears, set 
in that forest, as rare a human foothold as a ship 
in mid-ocean; a few lights and a few voices in the 
dark and interminable wastes. So I landed from 
our little craft elated with a sense of luckily ac- 
quired security. 

The white embowered village, the leaping foun- 
tains and the rocks, the air in a flutter with the 
shock of ponderous water collapsing, the surmount- 
ing island in mid-stream with its coronet of palms, 
the half-naked Indians idling among the Bolivian 
rubber boats hauled up to the foreshore below, the 
unexplored jungle which closed in and framed the 
scene, the fierce sun set in the rounded amplitude 
of the clouds of the rains, made the tropical picture 


which was the right reward for a great journey. I 


had come down long weeks of empty leisure, in 
which the mind got farther and farther away from 
the cities where time is so carefully measured and 
highly valued. The centre of the ultimate wilder- 
ness was more than a matter of fact. It was now a 


4 
) 
; 
j 
b 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 239 


personal conviction which needed no verification. 

The village had but one street. There were two 
rows of houses of a single storey, built of clay and 
plaster, dilapidated, the whitewash stained and 
peeling, every house open and cavernous below, 
without doors, in the way of Brazilian dwellings, to 
give coolness. The street was almost deserted when 
we entered it. A few children played in the shad- 
ows, and outside one house a merchant in a white 
cotton suit stood overlooking the scales while the 
half-breeds weighed balls of rubber; for this town 
is in the midst of the richest rubber country of the 
world, and all the wealth of the rivers Mamoré, 
Beni, and Madre de Dios comes this way. And 
that was why, as we idled through its single thor- 
oughfare, some dark girls came to stand at the 
house openings, dressed in odorous muslin, red 
flowers in their shiny black hair, and their smiling 
eyes full of interest in us. The rough road between 
the dwellings was overgrown with grass, and in the 
centre of it, partly hidden by the grass, was the 
line laid long ago by the railway enterprise which 
ended so tragically. ‘To-day the rubber mem use 
it as a portage for their boats. "There were several 
inns, half-obliterated names painted on their outer 
walls. They had crud@ interior walls of mud, and 
floors of bare earth. In such an inn would be a few 
iron tables and chairs, and “there a visitor might 
drink from bottles which at least bore European 
labels, though the contents and cost were past all 
European undefstanding. I forgot to say that by 
the eMshore of this little village is the head depot 


> 


a 


290 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


of a great rubber house, a building apparently out 
of all proportion to the size of San Antonio. But 
I looked on that place with the less interest, though 
from what my native companion told me the head 
of the house is a monarch more absolute and undis- 
puted in this wild-country than most eastern kings 
are to-day. 

_I was more interested in the huge boulders of 
smooth granite which rose strangely from the street 
in place’, and broke its regularity. These rounded 
and noble rocks often topped the houses. What 
man had built looked mean and transitory beside 
the poise and fine contours of the rocks. The colony 
of giant rocks had a look of settled and tranquil 
solidity, a friendly and hospitable aspect. They 
mrght have been old friends which time had proved; 
the houses beside them were alien by contrast. I 
that San Antonio had merely imposed itself 
on them, that they tolerated the village because it 
was but an incident; that they could afford to wait. 
When I saw them there I recognised the village of 
my map. I climbed to the summit of one, over its 
weather-worn shelves. It had a skin of lichen, 
warm in the sun and harshly familiar. The curious 
hieroglyphics of the lichen were intelligible enough, 
and more easily read than fhe signs on the walls of 
the inns. learned,where I was; and knew that 
when the day of the great rubber house had long 
passed, my village would still be there, and pros- 
pering. y 

Below my rock, on the land side—to which I had 
turned my back—was a monstrous cesspool. It 


* e 





eS 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 291 


was in the centre of the village. It was the capital 
of all flies, and the source and origin of all smells, 
varying smells which reposed, as I had found when 
below in the hot and stagnant street, in strata, each 
layer of smell invisible but well-defined. Among 
the weeds in the roads were many derelict cans. 
Over the empty tins, and the garbage, pulsed and 
darted hundreds of Brazil’s wonderful insects. 

But I was above all that, on my high rock. Its 
height released me to a wide and splendid liberty. 
I cannot tell you all that my vantage surveyed. 
But chiefly I was assured by what I saw that I 
was more central even than my eyes showed; they 
merely found for me the intimation. Here was all 
the proof I wanted; for faith is not blind, but crit- 
ical, yet instantly transcends to knowledge at the 
faintest glimmer of authentic light, as when an 
exile who is beset by inexplicable and puissant cir- 
cumstance among strangers whose tongue is’ Bar- 
barous, is surprised at a secret sign passed there of 
fellowship, and is at once content. Yet I can report 
but a broad river flowing smooth and bright out of 
indefinite distance between dark forests to the 
wooded islands below; and by the islands suddenly 
accelerated and divided, in a slight descent, pouring 
to a lower level in taut floods as smooth, noiseless, 
and polished as mercury. Lower still was the 
gleaming turmoil of the falls#pulsing, and ever on 
the point of vanishing, but constant, its shouting 
riot baffled by the green cliffs everywhere. But I 
could escape, for once, over the parapets of the 
jungle*to the upper rollidis ocean of leaves; to Ae 


o wae 


-f a 





292 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


distance, dim and blue, the region where man has 
never been. 


There was a man who looked like a sensational 
ruffian who boarded us one morning at ‘Porto 
Velho, and said he had come to find me. He was 
going up into the forest, beyond the track, and 
would I go with him? ‘That made me look at him 
again, and with some anxiety; for I had tried be- 
fore to get away, but the crowd on the “Capella” 
disliked the idea. The Doctor talked dysentery 
and things. He said it was safer to keep to the ship 
during the month we had still to spend at Porto 
Velho. I felt, overborne by their arguments, a 

‘ rather thin sort of adventurer. 'That mysterious 
railway oe have drawn the mind of any man 
who had not lost his curiosity, and who valued be- 
ing alive more than his chance of old age. The 
traeék went from Porto Velho into outer darkness. 
It left the clearing and the village of mushroom 

@ buildings, the place where the inhuman had been 

moderately subdued, where a modicum of industry 
was established in a continent of primitive wild, 
crossed a creek by a trestle bridge in view of our 
steamer, and vanished; that was the end of it, so 
far as we knew. Men came back to the settlement 
through that hole of the forest, and boarded the 
“Capella” to tell us,"in long hot nights, something 
of what the forest of the Madeira was hiding; and 
they were bearded like Crusoe, pallf@ as anzmic 
women, and speckled with insect bitese —These men — 
said that where they had been evorking the sun : 
6 « 

-o * ' oe ee 








THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 2903 


never shone, for his light was stopped on the un- 
broken green which, except where the big rivers 
flowed, roofed the whole land. I liked the look of 
the stranger who had come to persuade me to this 
rare holiday. He said his name was Marion Hill, 
of Texas. He wore muddy riding breeches, and a 
black shirt open at the throat, and boots of intri- 
cately embossed leather which came well up his 
thighs, spurs that would have ravelled a pachy- 
derm, and the insolent hat of a bandit. He had a 
waistbelt heavy with guns and ammunition. I saw 
his face, and divined instantly that this was a man, 
and that the memory of a time with him would 
serve me as a refuge in the grey and barren years, 
and as a solace. I told him I would get my things 
together. The Skipper called after me that if I 
returned too late I should have to walk home. 
There was a commissary train next morning, 
taking men and supplies to the camps. It had a 
number of open waggons, loaded with material, 
_ about which the labourers going up to replenish 
the gangs made themselves as comfortable as they 
could. I had an indiarubber bag for all my belong- 
ings, being told that it was best for strapping to a 
mule, and a valuable lifebuoy when a canoe over- 
turned. I accepted it with perfect faith, for I 
knew nothing of mules or canoes. The train moved 
off, a bell on the engine ringing sepulchrally. Hill 
and I were packed into a box car, which had a door 
open on either side for light and air. —Two Amer- 
ican engineers were in charge, there was an Aus- 
trian to superintend the distribution at each camp 


294. THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


of the provisions, the Austrian had an Italian as- 
sistant, and a few Barbadian blacks were there to 
move about the packages. I sat on a case of tinned 
fruit. Hill reposed on one of the shelves where we 
should stow fever victims, when we collected them. 
There was no more room in the ear, and another 
degree of heat would have meant complete ruin. 

When Porto Velho is left for the place where the 
line is to end, when completed, though it is but 250 
miles away, two months at least is required for the 
return journey. ‘That way goes the paymaster, 
with his armed escort, and every bundle of shovels 
and tin of provisions. When I went, too, the train 
helped for sixty miles. Then most of the material 
was transported at the Rio Caracoles, a tributary 
of the Madeira, and taken by boats in stages up the 
main stream, cargoes and boats being hauled round 
each cataract. Travellers could shorten the jour- 
ney by going overland part of the way, mules being 
kept on the hither side of the Caracoles river for 
that purpose. 

We delivered some patients at the hospital, went 
through a cutting of red granite to the back of San 
Antonio, and then entered the forest. ‘That ab- 
sorbed us. 'Thenceforward, and until I reached the 
ship again, I was dominated by the lofty, silent, 
confused, and brooding growth. Everywhere it 
was dramatically passionate in its intensity, an 
arrested riot of green life, and its muteness kept 
expectant attention fixed upon it. The right of 
way through the forest was a hundred feet wide. 


’ 


On each side of us the trees rose like virid cliffs. — 


; 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 2095 


The trees usually were of slender girth, almost as 
straight as fir poles, rising perhaps for sixty feet 
without a branch. Occasionally there was a giant, 
a silk cotton tree, or the strange tree with its grey 
trunk and pale birch-like habit of foliage which I 
had noticed on the riverside; but they were not 
common. Palms were numerous. From ground 
to high parapet the spaces between the columns 
were filled with lianas, unrelated big leaves, and 
the characteristic fronds of the endogens. In this 
older part of the track, though it had been made 
but little more than a year, the scrub was dense. 
The undergrowth was often so strong and aggres- 
sive as to brush the train as we slowly bumped 
along. Sometimes we went through deep cuttings 
in the red clay, close enough for me to notice it was 
interstratified with waterworn but angular quartz 
peebles. But the track usually was over flat coun- 
try, only rarely crossing a gulley. 

At every maintenance camp we stopped to de- 
liver supplies. From out of a small huddle of 
shanties made of leaves and poles, insignificant 
beneath the forest wall, a number of languid half- 
breeds, merely in pants and hats, would loiter 
through the hot sun to us for their sustenance. ‘The 
men of those secluded huts must have been glad of 
our temporary uproar, and our new faces. The 
bell rang, and we left them to burial in their deep 
silence again. There were intervening camps, 
which had been deserted as the work progressed. 
These were even more interesting to me. The work 
of the human, when he leaves it to the wild from 


by 


4250 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE) 


which he has won it with so much pain, has an ap- 
peal of its own, with its abandoned ruin returning 
to the ground again. ‘There would be a sandy 
swamp, and standing back from the lne some 
weather-worn shanties with roofs awry. I am sure 
there were ghosts in those camps. One we passed, 
and it was called Camp 1014, and resting against 
its open front where the posts were giving was a 
butterfly net. I pointed this out. “Oh, that,” said 
Hill. “Old man Biddell. I knew him. He was 
all right. He was great on bugs and butterflies. 
Used to wear spectacles. He was a good engineer 
though. Died of blackwater fever before the line 
got past this camp. That was his shack.” And 
that was his butterfly net, all of Biddell now, his 
sole monument and reminder. As we bumped by 
the huts the helicons and swallow tails rose precip- 
itously from the mangled cans and cast rubbish. I 
never knew Biddell, the man with spectacles and a 
butterfly net, but a first rate railway man, who left 
that net outside his hut one morning, and at eve- 
ning was buried, but now I am doomed to think of 
him while I live. | 

It was near midnight when we reached the last 
active camp but one on the line, where we alighted. 
It was wiser, I was told, to run the remaining 
length of the track by daylight. Here a doctor and 
a few engineers, bearing handlamps against which 
moths were blundering, met us in a place which 
seemed to be the bottom of a well, for the black 
shadows which rose round us shut out all but a few 
stars. The men raised joyous cries at the sight of 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 207 


Hill; and they took this stranger on trust. We fed 
in a hut which was four poles and a roof. One pole 
had a hurricane lamp tied ‘to it. There was an 
enormous quiet, which the men seemed to delight in 
breaking with their voices. Four planks nailed 
unevenly to uprights was our table, and we sat 
crooked on a similar but lower construction. We 
ate out of enamelled plates with iron instruments, 
and it was very good indeed. There were four of 
us who were white, and we were babes in the wood. 
One of us pretended he was playing on a Jew’s- 
harp, sang songs riotously, and then began to talk 
long and earnestly of New York. These men lived 
in four railway waggons which had doors made of 
copper gauze, berths with mosquito bars, and por- 
traits of the folk at home; and in the case of the 
doctor the waggon smelt of iodoform, had one wall 
full of bottles, and a table with a board and chess- 
men. In one of those waggons I lay down to sleep 
under a net; but the blanket felt damp and had a 
foreign smell. My thoughts crowded me. For 
long I listened to so much jungle pressing close to 
my bed, waiting for it to make known its near but 
unseen presence with a voice; but it did not. 

Next morning at sunrise the train moved for- 
ward to the construction camp at the Rio Cara- 
coles. I rode on a truck pushed in front of the 
locomotive, perched there with some engineers who 
kept a careful eye on the track. I saw at once why 
the train did not proceed at night. It was too spec- 
ulative altogether. Behind us the locomotive’s 
smoke stack rolled like a steamer’s funnel when a 


298 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


beam sea is running. This part of the line crossed 
many ravines, where we looked down upon the tree 
tops; and when on a frail wooden bridge which 
crossed a vacancy like that such movements of the 
drunken engine behind us became dazzling. ‘Then, 
too, there were some high “fills,” or embankments. 
After heavy rains these have a habit of retiring 
from the metals, which are left looped and twisted 
in mid-air. An engineer told me that one cannot 
always tell when an embankment is on the point of 
retiring. He was carefully watching, however. 
But we reached the construction camp. 

At the construction camp by the side of the Rio 
Caracoles we stayed two days. ‘There was the end 
of the line, and the men who were growing the 
track were so busy that I was left to my own 
devices. ‘Till the railwaymen came none but the 
Caripuna Indians knew what was there; so into the 
woods, of course, I would go, trying every track 
which led from the camp. A botanist might have 
seen some difference from the forest at Porto 
Velho, but I could not discover any. In appear- 
ance it was exactly the same. The trees mostly 
were arborescent laurels I believe, with smooth 
brown boles which were blotched through -their 
outer cuticle peeling away, much in the manner 
of that of the plane tree. The brown parchments 
of their laurel-like leaves covered the floor of the 
woods. The trees were rarely of great diameter, 
but their crowns were so distant that nothing could 
be made of their living foliage. I saw no flowers 
at all. There were few orchids, but the large 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 209 


shapely emerald coloured leaves of pothos plants 
were very frequent, sitting in the angles of 
branches and trunk. Aloft was always the wreck- 
age of vines suspended, as vaguely seen and as 
motionless as cobwebs and dilapidations in the over- 
head darkness of high vaults. I rarely heard a 
sound in that forest, though there was a bird which 
called. I often heard it in the woods of the upper 
Madeira. It called thrice, as a boy who whistles 
shrilly through his fingers; a long call, and then 
another whistle in the same key followed instantly 
by a falling note. One delightful walk was along 
a path which had not been made by the railwaymen, 
for it was evidently old, as it ran, a cleft in the 
trees, not through broken timber, but in partial 
sunshine, with a mesh of vines and freely growing 
plants on either side. It led downwards to a small 
stream, which was cumbered with fallen and rot- 
ting timber, a cool hollow where ferns were abun- 
dant. It was in the woods at the Caracoles that I 
first saw the great morpho butterfly at home. This 
species, peculiar to South America, is rarely seen 
except in the shades of the virgin forest. One day 
in the twilight aisles near the Caracoles camp, 
where nothing moved, and all was a grey monotone, 
it so surprised me with its happy undulating flight 
—as though it danced along, and were in no hurry 
—its great size, and its bright blue wings, that I 
rose mesmerised, stumbling after it through the 
dank litter, thoughtless of direction, not thinking 
of the danger of losing my way, thinking of noth- 
ing but that joyous resplendent creature dancing 


300 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


aloft ahead of me in the gloom and just beyond my 
reach, Its polished blue wings flashed like specule. 
It might have been a drifting fragment of sunny 
sky. I had never seen anything alive so beautiful. 
A fall over a log brought me to sobriety, and when 
I looked up it was gone. Afterwards I saw many 
of them; sometimes when walking the forest there 
would be morphos always in sight. 

The construction camp was not more than a 
month old. Perched on an escarpment by the line 
was a row of tents, and at the back of the tents 
some flimsy huts built of forest stuff. They stood 
about a ruin of felled trees, with a midden and its 
butterflies in the midst. Probably thirty white men 
were stationed there. ‘They were then throwing 
a wooden bridge across the Caracoles. Most of 
them were young American civil engineers, though 
some were English; and when I found one of them 
—and he happened to be a countryman of mine— 
balancing himself on a narrow beam high over a 
swift current, and, regardless of the air heavy with 
vapour and the torrid sun, directing the disposal 
of awkward weights with a concentration and keen- 
ness which made me recall with regret the way I 
do things at times, I saw his profession with a new 
regard. I noticed the men of that transient little 
settlement in the wilds were in constant high spirits. 
They betrayed nothing of the gravity of ‘their 
undertaking. They might have been boys em- 
ployed at some elaborate jest. But it seemed to 
me to be a pose of heartiness. They repelled real- 
ity with a laugh and a hand clapped to your shoul- 


‘= 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 301 


der. At our mess table, over the dishes of toucan 
and parrot supplied by the camp hunters, they 
rallied each other boisterously. ‘There was a touch 
of defiance in the way they referred to the sickness 
and the shadow; for it was notorious that changes 
were frequent in their little garrison. ‘They were 
forced to talk of these changes, and this was the 
way they chose to do it. As if laughter was their 
only prophylactic! But such laughter, to a visitor 
who did not have to wait till fever took him, but 
could go when he liked, could be answered. only 
with a friendly smile. Some of my cheery friends 
of the Caracoles were but the ghosts of men. 

Hill warned me late one afternoon to be ready 
to start at sunrise, and then went to play poker. 
On my way to my hut, at sunset, [ stopped to gos- 
sip with the young doctor, where he was busy 
dressing wounds at his surgery. The labourers, 
half-breeds, Brazilians, and Bolivian Spaniards, 
work being over, were giving the doctor a full eve- 
ning with their ailments. Mostly these were skin 
troubles. The least abrasion in the tropics may 
spread to a horrid and persistent wound. ‘The legs 
of the majority of these natives were unpleasant 
with livid scars s. In one case a vampire bat had 
punctured a man’s arm near the elbow while he 
slept, and that little wound had grown disastrously. 
We were in a region where the pium flies swarmed, 
tiny black insects which alight on the hands and 
face, perhaps a dozen at a time, and gorge them- 
selves, though you may be unconscious of it. Where 


302 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


the pium fly feeds it leaves a dot of extravasated 
blood which remains for weeks, so that most of us 
were speckled. HEiven these minute wounds were 
liable to become deep and bad. There were larger 
flies which put their eggs in the human body, where 
they hatch with dire results. (Do not think the 
splendid tropics have nothing but verdure, orchids, 
butterflies, and coral snakes banded orange and 
black and crimson and black.) So the doctor was 
a busy man that evening. The floor of his surgery 
was made of unequal boughs; the walls and roof 
were of dried fronds. A lamp was slung on a door- 
post. He was a young American, and he did not 
grumble at his bumpy floor, the bad light, the 
appliances and remedies which were all one should 
expect in the jungle, nor the number of his 
patients, except comically. He told me he was 
rather keen on the diseases of the tropics. He liked 
them. (I should think he must have liked them.) 
He was merrily insolent with those swarthy and 
melancholy men, and they smiled back sadly at the 
clever, handsome, and lively youngster. He was 
quick in his decisions, deft, insistent, kind, and 
thorough, working down that file of pitiable hu- 
manity, as careful with the last of the long row as 
with the first; telling me, as he went along, much 
that I had never heard before, with demonstra- 
tions. “Don’t go,” he cried, when I would have 
left him; for I thought it might be he was as kind 
with this stranger as he was with the others. “Ah! 
don’t go. Let me hear a true word or two.” He 
said he would give me a treat if I stayed. He 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 303 


finished, put his materials away deliberately, accur- 
ately, his back to me, while I saluted him as a fine 
representative of ours. He turned, free of his task 
and jolly, and produced that treat of his, two 
bottles of treasured and precious ginger ale. It 
was a miracle performed. We talked till the light 
went out. | 
Much later a cry in the woods woke me. It was 
yet dark, but I could see Hill up, and fumbling 
with his accoutrements. Out I jumped, though still 
unreasonably tired; and sleepily dressed. When 
I turned to Hill, to see if he were ready, he was 
then under his net, watching me. He explained 
he had just returned from poker, and was won- 
dering why I was dressing, but did not like to 
ask, knowing that Englishmen have ways that are 
not American. So the sun was up long before we 
were, though presently, in a small canoe, we em- 
barked on the Caracoles. This tributary of the 
Madeira comes from nobody knows where. It is 
a river of the kind which explorers in these forests 
have sometimes mentioned, to our fearful joy. The 
sunlight hardly reached the water. The river was 
merely a drain burrowing under the jungle. The 
forest on its banks met overhead. There was little 
foliage below; we saw but the base of the forest, 
grey columns that might have been of stone up- 
holding a darkness from which dead stuff 
suspended, ‘The canoe had to dodge the lianas, 
which dropped to the water. ‘The noise of our 
paddles convoyed us down stream, a rout of panic 
echoes trying to escape. We came to an opening 


304. THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


and full daylight presently, and landed by a mule 
corral; and I began a lonely ride with Hill through 
the forest. The mule was such a docile little brown 
creature that I was left in the silence to my 
thoughts, which were interrupted now and then by 
the wandering blue flame of a morpho. My mule 
followed Hill’s mule along a winding trail, and our 
leader was nearly always out of sight. I do not 
remember much of my first ride in the forest. I 
had an impression of being at a viewless distance 
from the sun. We were on the abysmal floor of a 
growth which was not trees, but the hoary pedi- 
ments of a structure which was too high and vast 
for human sight. We rode in the basal gloom of it, 
no more than lost ants there, at an immeasurable 
depth in the atmosphere. The roof of the world 
was far away. Somewhere was the sun, for occa- 
sionally there was a well which its light had filled, 
and a grove of green palms, complete and personal, — 
standing at the bottom of the well, living and reas- — 
onable shapes. Or one of the morphos would 
flicker among those spectral bastions, aerial and 
bright as a fairy in Hades. The sombre mind 
caught it at once, an unexpected gleam of hope, a 
bright blue thought to set among one’s shapeless — 
fears. We descended into hollows, going down — 
into darker fathoms of the shades; mounted again — 
through brighter suffusions of day, and in a while © 
came out upon the open lane in the woods, the long — 
cut in the jungle made for the railway, when it 
should get so far. 

Now I could see my companion. He was from ~ 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 305 


Texas, and it was easy to guess that. In the long 
rides which followed in the land where we looked 
upon what was there for the first time since genesis, 
where we might have been in the hush of the sev- 
enth day, so new, strange, and quiet was all, the 
figure ahead of me, with its long boots, negligent 
black shirt, the guns about the waist, and the hat 
with its extravagant size nobly raked, made me stop 
at times to assure myself that I was not pursuing 
a day-dream of boyhood, too much Mayne Reid in 
my head, especially when my wild and improbable 
companion paused under a group of statuesque 
palms and looked back at me—TI suppose to make 
sure that I was still there, and that the silence had 
not absorbed me utterly, a faint rustle of intruding 
sound in a virgin and absorbent world. And again 
I remember the sparkle and lift of early morning 
there. The air was new, it was stimulative, it re- 
charged me with buoyant youth. ‘To breathe that 
air in the fresh of the morning was exaltation, and 
to see the young sunlight on the ardent foliage was 
to know the springs of life were full. That was at 
the breakfast hour, when the camp fires crackled 
and were aromatic, the smoke going straight to the 
tree tops. Then quickly the narrow track through 
the forest filled with day, increased in heat till I 
felt I could bear no more of it, and so gazed 
vacantly at the mule’s ears, merely enduring and 
numbed. ‘The vitality of the morning went, and in 
the fierce pour of light I looked no more to the 
strange leaves and vines, the curious fronds, the 
anthills by the way, the butterflies and birds, but 


306 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


had only a dull dread that the avenue through 
which we were riding was straight and intermin- 
able. 'There was no escape from this heat. There 
were no openings through which we could retreat 
under the trees. The air was immobile; the air 
itself was the incumbent heat. The only shadows 
were under the mules’ bellies. Cruel and relent- 
less noons! How the surveyors endured it, stand- 
ing for long eyeing their exacting instruments in 
such a defeating glare, I do not know. At the end 
of each day my pigskin leggings were like wet 
brown paper with sweat, and my hands crinkled 
and bleached as though they had been in a soda 
bath. 

We reached another and greater tributary of the 
Madeira, the Rio Jaci-Parana. Here there was a 
very extensive clearing as great as the one at Porto 
Velho. The bridging of the Jaci would be a con- — 
siderable undertaking, consequently there were — 
numerous huts dotted about the rough open ~ 
ground; but I think the original intention in cut- — 
ting back the jungle to such an extent was that in — 
the days to come a town would grow there. I 
imagine it will not, and that the project is aban- — 
doned. In one of my early walks in the woods I ~ 
came by chance upon the new cemetery; it was — 
already large. The Jaci country has proved to be — 
more than usually unhealthy. The ground was — 
cleared down to a coarse herbage, round which stood ~ 
shadowing trees. Little crucifixes, made by sphit- j 
ting a stick and putting another stick crosswise in — 
the slit, were planted at all sorts of drunken angles — t 


THE SEAAND THE JUNGLE 307 


in the ground. One large cross in the centre stood 
for all the dead. There were no names given. A 
Brazil nut-tree grew alongside this graveyard in 
the jungle, so tall that the flock of screaming par- 
rots about its foliage were but drifting black 
specks. 

Because Hill had a touch of the fever we stayed 
for some days by the Jaci. I had a hut given to me, 
typical of the rest; but I was so much alone in it 
that that hut on the Jaci, where our remoteness 
from human things tested and known, the aloofness 
and quiet of the forest, the deadly nature of the 
romantic and beautiful river bank where we were 
marooned, and the sickness of my friend Hili, 
threw me upon my centre, until I began even to 
talk to myself, and received such an impress of the 
minute details of my little habitation that, ephem- 
eral as it was and now long since gone, it endures, 
of coloured and indestructible stuff, with a sunny 
portal I still can enter whenever my mind turns 
that way. It was of four palm trunks, lapped 
round and over with mats of leaves. ‘The floor was 
of untrimmed branches, two feet from the earth, 
and their unexpected inequalities, never remem- 
bered, were always jolting my thoughts as I walked 
across. ‘They were crooked, and I could see the 
dusty earth two feet beneath where brown and 
green lizards ran, At one end was a verandah 
with a narrow floor made of the lids of soap and 
dynamite boxes, and laid without any idea that 
some curious tenant might wish to read the manu- 
facturers’ full names and see their complete trade 


308 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


marks. It was a puzzle. There was nothing to 
do, and I searched long on my verandah floor for 
the clue to one embarrassing fragment of a sten- 
cilled word. Hill sometimes huddled in a hammock 
on one side of the verandah, a leg hanging limply 
over, his thin sallow face drawn and resting on his 
breast, and his eyes shut; and I sat near him on the 
rail, silent, alone with any thought I met, and gaz- 
ing blankly down the steep slope, past two tall 
Brazil nut-trees, to the half-hidden Rio Jaci below, 
and the roof of the forest opposite, over which the 
sun set each day in uplifted splendour. I remem- 
bered but one conversation during that wait. An 
elderly white man came up to the verandah one 
evening, and murmured something to Hill, who — 
opened his eyes, and looked at his visitor under — 
weary lids. This man was one of Hiuill’s subor- | 
dinates. He had something to say of the work; — 
but one would hardly call it speech. The flow of ~ 
his life was so weak that he could do no more than ~ 
lift a few small words from his gaping mouth be- ~ 
tween his breaths. He held on to the verandah, 
His loose clothes hung straight down from his ( 
bones. The veins were in blue knots on his fore- ~ 
head. “Say,” said Hill, rousing himself, “I want © 
you to ride to the Caracoles, go down to Porto © 
Velho, and take this note to the hospital.” The ~ 
man said nothing, but nodded. Hill scrawled his — 
note, and the man left. “He'll be dead in a month,” j 
said Hill, five minutes after the man had gone. 
“But he would not go to the hospital for his health. ~ 
I have to pretend that he must go for mine. He 






THE SEAAND THE JUNGLE 309 


may as well die in a comfortable bed. . . . I wish 
those damned parrots would cease! ‘They were 
somewhere down by the river, unseen, but all the 
sound there was, their voices long, keen and dis- 
tracting flaws in the pellucid and coloured day- 
fall. 

One morning we crossed the Jaci, and on the 
opposite shore some mules were already geared 
with .Texan saddles, the hombres at their heads, 
waiting for us. I considered my mule. He was a 
big, grey, upstanding fellow, with the legs and 
feet of a racehorse, the head of a hammer, and 
alert and inquisitive ears. He was very much alive. 
I had no doubt he could leave anywhere like light, 
when he had a mind for it. So that I turned to 
Hill, and said, “Is mine a quiet animal? Is he 
vicious?” “QO say,” said my guide, glancing care- 
lessly at my dubious mount, “I guess he’s just a 
mule.” When a hombre shouted at my mule he 
stepped briskly, with more than a hint of the ma- 
licious rebel in his gait. 

I knew it would happen, and it did. One foot 
was no sooner buried in a wooden shoe called a 
stirrup than he was off, like an explosion. A 
desperate leap got my other leg over my travelling 
sack, lashed on his rump, and I came down in the 
saddle, much surprised. ‘Texan saddles are not 
leather pads for riding domestic creatures, but 
thrones for ruling devils, and the bit would have 
broken the mouth of a hippopotamus. The brute 
stopped, turned back one ear, and his thought was 
in his swivel eye. “You wait,’ I saw him say. In 


Se 


310 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


the few engrossing moments when his body was 
expanding and contracting under me I got some 
idea of the force I was supposed to guide, and it 
did not make my mind easy, for an office chair had 
been my most unstable seat till then. Yet off we 
went quietly, along the track, and Hill was in 
front, and my mule was as meek as a sheep. There 
came a swamp, into which he went to the knees, and 
I dismounted, jumping from hummock to hum- 
mock, encouraging him, and showing him the best 
places. His brown eyes were then like those of a 
good woman. So leaning forward, when we were 
through, I patted his sleek neck, and gave him 
pleasant words. Afterwards, when he showed a 
certain precious care in difficult places, for the — 
country was very broken, stepping like a tight- 
rope walker, I was fool enough to think it was be- 
cause of our understanding. ‘Though I believe 
he would have deceived anybody. | 
At noon we left the track and entered the forest 
by a path so narrow that the trees touched our ~ 
legs, and sometimes we had just time to duck be-— 
neath a noose which a liana dangled in our faces. © 
It was a low and narrow tunnel, and it descended © 
to a bottom where a shallow stream brawied among 
granite boulders; thence up the trail went through — 
the trees and vines again, and at last we came to a 
little clearing, where there was a hut, and men who — 
would give us meat and drink. We dismounted. — 
I rubbed my mule’s soft nose, and spoke him play- | 
fully, as a familiar; but when entering the hut was 5 
rebuked by a man there for making a short cut 


: 
- 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 311 


round the heels of my mule. ‘Never do it. Don’t 
give him a chance. A mule will be peaches for ten 
years waiting for the sure chance of getting his 
heels right on your stomach. They’re not horses, 
them mules. They don’t bite, and they don’t muzzle 
you and show friendly. 'They’ve got no feelings. 
That chap of yours, his mother was an ass, and his 
father was old Solfernio himself. But they’ve all 
got one good point—they’re barren.” 

The mule stood deep in thought till I was 
mounted again; then instantly bolted back along 
the path which led to the ravine. The idle hombre 
had mishandled the reins, and I could get no pull. 
I went across that clearing like (so Hill said after- 
wards) Tod Sloan up. The beast, his ears back, 
was in a frenzy, and the convulsions of his power- 
ful body made my thoughts pallid and ghastly. 
Nothing but disaster could stop him, and the black 
mouth of that steep tunnel in the forest yawned 
before us, and grew larger, though not large 
enough. He took the opening as clean as a lucky 
shot; but I was laid carefully along his back. Why 
we missed the tangle of woods and the rocks in that 
precipitate descent is known only to my lucky stars. 
I had my feet from the stirrups, my toes hooked 
on his rump, one arm round the horn of the saddle, 
and the other stretched along his sawing neck. I 
saw the roots and stones leap up and by us, close 
to my face. Several things occurred to me, and 
one was that some methods of dire fate were fatu- 
ous and undignified. I wondered also whether I 
should be taken back to the ship, or buried there. 


312 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


The impetus of the brute, which I expected would 
send us somersaulting among the rocks of the bot- 
tom, took him partly up the hither slope, and soon 
he had to gather his haunches for the upward leaps. 
I slipped off. He swung round at the length of 
the reins, and eyed me, cocking his ears derisively. 
A horse’s nerves are human-like, and a horse would 
have been in a muck, but this murderous mule was 
calm and mocking. I watched him, and listened 
for an obscene and confident guffaw. 3 

I found afterwards that punishment has no more 
effect on them than kindness. There is no guidance 
in this matter, take the mule all round. It is deal- 
ing with the uncanny. It is better to cross yourself 
when you go near a mule. Every morning about a 
camp we would watch the hombres gear up those 
pensive and placid creatures. ‘They were sleek, 
lissom, and beautiful, and it was a pleasure to 
watch them. But as soon as the business of the 
day began one of the mules (and there was no 
prophecy as to which one it would be) became a 
homicidal maniac. At one camp it was necessary 
to keep a hundred or more mules in reserve, and 
there, for their health, a sane old horse was kept 
also. ‘The horse was a knacker’s body, a sorry 
spectacle, and in that climate he but pottered about 
waiting for disease to take him. He was smaller 
than the fine and healthy mules, but the respect the 
hammer-heads had for him was comical, and a 
great help to the men. Without the horse, it 
would have been opening the door of an asylum 
to have let the mules out of the corral to water at 


y, 
THE SEA AND. THE JUNGLE 313 


the river. But he led the way, and they bunched 
round him bashfully, and followed him to the 
stream. He took no notice of them whatever. He 
did not flatter them by pretending to be aware of 
their existence. When he had had his fill, he turned, 
and ambled through them, scorning to see them, 
and returned to the corral. Round went all the 
mules nearest to him, and any of them on the 
outskirts of the mob that stayed on because they 
did not see him go lost their heads, when they 
looked up, and risked their necks in short cuts 
through the timber. “Ho, mule!” would shout the 
hombres in alarm; for even mules cost money. 


The land through which we were riding shall 
have a little railway there some day, if the men ' 
who are building it keep their hearts of brass, and 
refuse in working hours to remember London and 
New York. When it is there, that short line, it 
will begin and end in places having names which 
will convey little meaning to people outside Brazil; 
but to know what endurance of valour, but chiefly 
what raillery and light-hearted disregard of the 
gods who put baleful forests guarded by dragons— 
the dragons of mythology were lambs to what mos- 
quitoes are—in the path of weak men pursuing their 
purpose, to know what has gone to the building 
of that track, though it nowhere plainly shows, for 
the, graveyards are casual and obscure, brings you 
to a stand, surprised into awe of your fellows, as 
though through a coarse disguise you caught a 
gleam of divinity. Something shows, a light shows, 


314 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


which is beyond human. Would men be so prodi- 
gal of life and time if they were not aware of their 
great wealth? I don’t know. My travels never 
brought me to that ultimate assurance. But I did 
see that my fellow-men are indifferent, spendthrift 
with their known and scanty store as though they 
were immortals, the remittance men of Great Jove. 
I have no doubt now the line will be finished some 
day; but there were times, riding along the roughly 
cleared trail where it is to be, and we came upon 
places where men, in a spasm of pointless and soon 
expiring energy had scratched and mauled the pris- 
tine earth, when I did not think so. Always the 
same dumb mystery was about us at noon as at 
nightfall. I felt we were lost at the back of the 
world, that we had crossed the boundary beyond 
which the voice of traffic never goes, and were idly 
wandering on the confines of oblivion. Sometimes 
I had that consciousness of futility which comes to 
us when, in sleep, we are earnest in the absurd 
activities of a dream, one point of the reason re- 
maining awake to wonder at the antics of the busy 
but blind mind. Why was I there at all? Was I 
there? Those forlorn spots in the forest where our 
fellows had been before us, which we two riders 
overlooked alone, seemed to show that those men, 
while in the midst of their feverish labour, had re- 
covered their minds, and had seen the wilderness 
was too vast, was unconquerable; and they had fled. 
There before us was what they had done. A deep 
trench would be in the track, the sand thrown up 
on either side. Some dead trees would be prone 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 315 


in our path, and we had to ride round them, There 
would be a few empty huts of leaves, with old ashes 
at the entrances, and a midden with its usual gor- 
geous butterflies. There would not be a sign of 
life, except the butterflies over the refuse, and not 
a sound or a movement but a clink from our own 
harness, and the heads of our mules impatient with 
the flies. Over the evidence of man’s far-fetched 
enterprise and industry, his short and ferocious at- 
tack on the wild, brooded the forest. That bent 
over us, and it might have been solicitous and com: 
passionate, or it might have been merely curious 
about the behaviour of the surprising creatures who 
had come there for the first time, and had been so 
active for a while. Sitting in the pour of the sun, 
looking upon the scanty work of my fellows, and 
then upon the near watchful ranks of that conti- 
nent of trees pressing close to regard the grave? — 
like trench into which man’s hope might have been | 
thrown, I had a dread of the easy and enduring 
dominion of those powers which were before man. 

We would ride on then, sometimes up to our 
saddles in swamps, and every day I lost faith that 
there was any company of our fellows in that deso- 
lation, who would take our mules at nightfall, and 
show hammocks for our rest. But always before 
night caught us we would spy a few huts diminu- 
tive under the cliffs of forest—land ho!—and the 
little outpost of two or three engineers and a doctor 
would meet us as we came up. Such a camp was 
like finding security and fellowship again after the 
uncertainty and emptiness of the sea. The voices 


316 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


of new friends disarmed the forest. It was not 
curious that we found it so easy to talk and laugh. 

One such camp I remember well. We came upon 
it late, and my bones, through a longer ride than 
usual in the wooden saddle, had grown into an un- 
jointed frame. This was the real meaning of 
fatigue. My body was a comprehensive ache. Yet 
my mind was alert and buoyant; and I remembered 
that perhaps it was so because I had been well bit- 
ten by the mospuitoes of the Jaci-Parana, a first 
effect of the inoculation; so I swallowed twenty 
grains of my store of quinine. 

You in settled lands, unless you have been very 
poor indeed and know what trouble is and what 
friends are, have never seen the face of your 
brother, nor the serenity of evening when you have 
found, without expecting it, shelter for the night; 
you don’t know what the taste of bread and meat is, 
nor the savour of tobacco, nor what comfortable 
security is the whispering of:a comrade unseen in 
the shadows of a resting place, nor what it is to 
sleep. I found those gifts are not means to life 
only, but reasons for living too; something to live 
for. With these at nightfall, our frail little hut, 
beleaguered in the limitless woods, the shack in 
which the ants and spiders swarmed and gross in- 
sects rang on the metal lamp, where we loafed in 
hammocks, smoking, and listened to the cries of 
we knew not what in the unknown about us, was © 
impregnable to the hosts of darkness, 

Perhaps I remember that camp so well because 
it was a night of full moon. ‘There were three huts. 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 317 


We were deep in the trees. The dark walls of that 
well in the jungle rose sheer all round us. Nobody 
knew what was beyond the huts. The moon ‘ap- 
peared just clear of the lofty parapet of the well, 
and poured down to us an imponderable rarity of 
bluish fire. Wherever this fire lodged it stayed. 
Half-way up projected palm fronds, and they 
were heavy patterns in burnished silver. Name- 
less shapes grew luminous in the dark about us. 
The ragged thatch of a hut fell from its apex in a 
cascade of lustrous fluid metal suddenly congealed. 
The gloom beneath that shining roof was hollowed 
by the pale yellow light of a lamp; so I could 
see, under the eaves, the three hammocks slung 

from the posts. The quiet talk of my companions 
was the only sound. I limped with weariness 
towards the voices, and sat in a shadow listening; 
and looked beyond to sprays of motionless shining 
foliage leaning out from inscrutable darkness. I 
seemed to have escaped from my tired body; my 
disembodied mind was free and at large. A camp 
hunter had killed a jaguar there, during the after- 
noon, they were saying. ‘There were many about, 
for we were beyond the railway men, the track 
being but a lane of felled trees. They were saying 
the country there abounded with wild life. Just 
as we arrived that evening one of the men brought 
in a wounded animal, its nature so disguised that I 
thought it was a kindof sloth. It was about two 
feet long, and covered with long grizzled hair from 
its snout to the end of its considerable tail; but 
when I lifted it, and the poor injured creature 


318 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


shook its hair from its eyes, I saw it was a monkey; 
that anguished and fearful gaze which met mine 
was of my own tiny brother. It was a rare and 
little-known creature, the Hairy Saki, the first of 
its kind I had seen. The native took it away to 
eat it. I may say that at every camp we ate what 
we could get; and being by nature squeamish I 
never asked what it was that was’ put before me. 
Whatever it was, there it was, and it was all they 
could give me. I only emphatically directed that 
monkey flesh would be worse to me than hunger. 
“There are plenty of tigers about here,” called 
one of our hosts to me; “I'll fix you with a gun to- 
morrow, and well have some fun.” But thank 
you, no. I did not carry arms throughout my jour- 
ney. The jaguars did me no hurt when I went 
exploring o’ mornings; and as for me, I was not 
looking for trouble. Quite politely the jaguars 
retired while I wandered about alone; though I 
should have been delighted to have sighted one. 
The whiffs of feral odour I got, especially in the 
neighbourhood of the mules, about which the 
jaguars prowled at night, were my only big game 
trophies. Sometimes an indistinguishable object 
would step across ahead of me, or stir in a bush 
close by, drawing ear and eye at once in a place 
where trees and leaves were always as fixtures, 
like the air. I never met one of the larger natives 
of the place. I knew the parrots by their voices. 
I heard and smelt the cats. The monkeys called 
from a great distance; or a body would slip round 
a tree so like a shadow moving that when I exam- 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 319 


ined the place, and saw nothing, it was easy to 
believe the eye was only suspicious. 

The men began to talk of the Indians. They said 
we were in the land of the Caripunas. “You won’t 
see them,” said Hill. “I expect they are watching 
us now though,” he added, after a pause. I glanced 
up with some interest at the spectral foliage, where 
right before me the pale moonfire on leaves and 
trunks framed portals in the night. I could see 
nothing. 

“It’s odds that some of them have been follow- 
ing us all day,” continued Hill. “They watch us. 
They can’t make us out. The rubber men told us 
the Caripunas would kill and eat us. 'They kill the 
rubber men all right, and a good job too. But they 
only slip through the forest watching us. I saw 
some once. On the Jaci. I jollied them into put- 
ting their canoe ashore. It was only a bark con- 
traption, the roughest thing of its kind I’ve seen, 
_ sharpened fore and aft by lacing the ends together 
with sinews. ‘They were fine light brown fellows, 
well made, and stark naked. The black hair of some 
of them was frizzy. Curious, isn’t it? But I’ve 
heard that in the slave days runaway niggers got 
down here, and the forest Indians collared them to 
improve their own miserable stock. The Brazilians 
have always had a tradition of a frizzy-haired race 
on the Madeira; and here they are. They had bows 
and arrows, those chaps, made entirely of cane and 
wood. The arrows were tipped with macaw 
feathers, and were over six feet long. I couldn’t 
bend the bloomin’ bow. These fellows keep to the 


320 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


side rivers, and their villages are always hidden in 
the woods. It’s a funny thing, but whenever the 
surveyors come on a village they find it has been 
vacated about a week.” 

We were silent for a time, and then a half-breed 
crept up to a hammock and spoke in Spanish to the 
doctor. The doctor laughed; and the fellow went 
away. ‘He’s asking for a piece of that onca to 
eat. He says it will make him strong.” They 
began to talk of that, and the talk went on to what 
the Indians say of the mai d’aqua, the mother of 
the waters, who frequents islands in the rivers and 
is the ruin of young men, and of such dreads as the 
jurupari, and the curupira, and the maty tapére. 

They admitted it was easy to imagine such things 
into the forest. It wasn’t what was seen there. 
Only the trees and the shadows were seen. But 
sometimes there were sounds. One of us, when 
alone making a traverse in the forest, had heard a 
scream, as if a woman had been frightened, and 
then there was no more sound. ‘The camp doctor 
began to talk. He was an Englishman. He sat 
upright in the middle of his hammock, swinging 
it with one foot. “There was a curious yarn I 
heard about a tiger in Hampshire. Ah! Hamp- 
shire! I had a practice there once, you know. It 
made me so busy and popular that at last I began 
to wonder whether I wasn’t altogether too success- 
ful. It was the practice or me. As I wanted to 
live on and do some useful work I slew the practice. 
I’ve got one or two ideas about that beri-beri you 
chaps die of here. A doctor cannot serve God and 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 321 


a lot of old women with colds. . . . Oh yes, about 
that tiger. Well, one of those travelling shows 
came to our village. I could see the steam of its 
roundabout engines from my surgery windows, and 
I told the farmer who rented the field to the show- 
men that if he let a mechanical organ come any- 
where near my place again he could take his gall- 
stone somewhere else in future. 

“Late one night I got an urgent message to go 
over to the show. There had been an accident. I 
was taken into a caravan. There was a fat woman 
dressed as a pink fairy kneeling over a man 
stretched on a bunk, shaking him, and crying. The 
man was dead all right. But I couldn’t find a mark 
on him. Diseased heart, I supposed, but he looked 
a good ’un. Some of the well-made, powerful chaps 
have most unreliable hearts. The woman kept 
crying out something about ‘that beast of a tiger.’ 
Curious sort of remark, and I asked the boss after- 
wards what she meant. He shuffled about a bit, 
pretending that she was talking silly. “Nothing to 
do with the tigress,’ he said, ‘although the man was 
found unconscious in her cage.’ ‘It’s such a tame 
thing,’ said the showman. ‘Anybody could handle 
it. Never shows vice. Old Jackson’—that was the 
dead chap—‘he’d been inside tinkering with a par- 
tition. When we found him she was lying in a 
corner as if asleep, and only sat up and yawned 
when we got him out of her cage. Come and see 
for yourself.’ 

“I went. There was nothing to see, except a 
slit-eyed tigress sitting up in a corner of her cage, 


R22 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


blinking at the lantern, and looking rather spooky. 
A rather small creature, and prettily marked—one 
of the melantic variety. 

“Well, the chap was buried after an inquest, and 
that inquest made me ask a lot of questions after- 
wards. It was a simple affair, the inquest. Death 
from natural causes. But there was something be- 
hind the evidence of the man’s wife, and I wanted 
to find out about that. 

“She told me she had a little girl, who got one 
night into the tent where the big cats were kept. 
Nobody was there at the time. Next morning she 
said to her mother, ‘Mummie, who was the funny 
lady in Lucy’s cage?” 

“Lucy was the name of the tigress. The child 
said that there was only the lady in the cage, and 
the lady watched her. And that was all they could 
get out of the kiddie. The funny thing about it is 
that once before the child had come back with a 
yarn like that, after straying into the menagerie 
tent late at night. The wife’s idea was her husband 
had died of fright. 

“Don’t ask me what I want to make out, boys. 
I’m only just telling you the yarn. There you are. 

“Well, before the show left our village, I heard 
they’d got a nigger to look after the big cats. He 
was with the show two days. On the third day he 
was missing. He went without drawing his money, 
and he had left open the door of Lucy’s cage. She 
hadn’t attempted to get out. The nigger was found 
some days after, wandering about the country, and 
a little cracked, by all accounts. And that’s all.” 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE = 323 


The doctor struck a match, and then hoisted his 
legs into the hammock. Somewhere far in the 
forest the monkeys were howling. 

“That doctor is a good body mender,” said Hill 
to me. “He is the most entertaining liar on this 
job.” 


VI 


WHEN in the neighbourhood of the Girau Falls 
we returned to a camp known as 22, which was 
merely a couple of huts, the station of two English 
surveyors, who had with them a small party of 
Bolivians. The Bolivian frontier was then but a 
little distance to the south-west. We rested for a 
day there, and planned to make a journey of ten 
miles across country, to the falls of the Caldeirao do 
Inferno. By doing so we should save the wearying 
return ride along the track to the Rio Jaci-Parana, 
for at the Caldeirao a launch was kept, and in that 
we could shoot the rapids and reach the camp on 
the Jaci two days earlier. Some haste was neces- 
sary now, for my steamer must be nearing her sail- 
ing time. And again, I agreed the more readily 
to the plan of making a traverse of the forest be- 
cause it would give me the opportunity of seeing 
the interior of the virgin jungle away from any 
track. Though I had been so long in a land which 
all was forest I had not been within the universal 
growth except for little journeys on used trails. A 
journey across country in the Amazon country is 
never made by the Brazilians. The only roads are 
the rivers. It is a rare traveller who goes through 
those forests, guided only by a compass and his lore ~ 
of the wilderness. That for months I had never 
been out of sight of the jungle, and yet had rarely 
324 


THE SEAAND THE JUNGLE 325 


ventured to turn aside from a path for more than 
a few paces, is some indication of its character. At 
the camp where we were staying I was told that 
once a man had gone merely within the screen of 
leaves, and then no doubt had lost, for a few mo- 
ments, his sense of direction of the camp, for he 
was never seen again. | 

The equatorial forest is popularly pictured as a 
place of bright and varied colours, with extrava- 
gant flowers, an abundance of fruits, and huge 
trees hung with creepers where lurk many venom- 
ous but beautiful snakes with gem-like eyes, and a 
multitude of birds as bright as the flowers; para- 
dise indeed, though haunted by a peril. Those 
details are right, but the picture is wrong. It is 
true that some of the birds are decorated in a way 
which makes the most beautiful of our temperate 
birds seem dull; but the toucans and macaws of the 
Madeira forest, though common, are not often seen, 
and when they are seen they are likely to be but 
obscure atoms drifting high in a white light. About 
the villages and in the clearings there are usually 
many superb butterflies and moths, and a varied 
wealth of vegetation not to be matched outside the 
tropics, and there will be the fireflies and odours 
in evening pathways. But the virgin forest itself 
soon becomes but a green monotony which, through 
extent and mystery, dominates and compels to awe 
and some dread. You will see it daily, but will not 
often approach it. It has no splendid blossoms; 
none, that is, which you will see, except by chance, 
as by luck one day I saw from the steamer’s bridge 


326 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


some trees in blossom, domes of lilac surmounting 
the forest levels. Trees are always in blossom 
there, for it is a land of continuous high summer, 
and there are orchids always in flower, and palms 
and vines that fill acres of forest with fragrance, 
palms and other trees which give wine and delicious 
fruits, and somewhere hidden there are the birds of 
the tropical picture, and dappled jaguars perfect 
in colouring and form, and brown men and women 
who have strange gods. But they are lost in the 
ocean of leaves as are the pearls and wonders in the 
deep. You will remember the equatorial forest but 
as a gloom of foliage in which all else that showed 
was rare and momentary, was foundered and lost 
to sight instantly, as an unusual ray of coloured 
light in one mid-ocean wave gleams, and at once 
goes, and your surprise at its apparition fades too, 
and again there is but the empty desolation which 
is for ever but vastness sombrely bright. 

One morning, wondering greatly what we should 
see in the place where we should be the first men 
to go, Hill and I left camp 22 and returned a little 
along the track. It was a hot still morning. A 
vanilla vine was in fragrant flower somewhere, un- 
seen, but unescapable. My little unknown friend 
in the woods, who calls me at odd times—but I 
think chiefly when I am near a stream—by whis- 
tling thrice, let me know he was about. Hill said 
he thinks he has seen him, and that my little friend 
looks like a blackbird. On the track in many places 
were objects which appeared to be long cups in- 
verted, of unglazed ware. Picking up one I found 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 327 


it was the cap to a mine of ants, the inside of the 
clay cup being hollowed in a perfect circle, and 
remarkably smooth. A paca dived into the scrub 
near us. It was early morning, scented with vanilla, 
and the intricacy of leaves was radiant. Nowhere 
in the screen could I see a place through which it 
was possible to crawl to whatever was behind it. 
The front of leaves was unbroken. Hill presently 
bent double and disappeared, and I followed in the 
break he made. So we went for about ten minutes, 
my leader cutting obstructions with his machete, 
and mostly we had to go almost on hands and knees. 
The undergrowth was green, but in the etiolated 
way of plants which have little light, though that 
may have been my fancy. One plant was very 
common, making light-green feathery barriers. I 
think it was a climbing bamboo. Its stem was vapid 
and of no diameter, and its grasslike leaves grew in 
whorls at the joints. It extended to incredible dis- 
tances. We got out of that margin of undergrowth, 
which springs up quickly when light is let into the 
woods, as it was there through the cutting of the 
track, and found ourselves on a bare floor where the 
trunks of arborescent laurels grew so thickly to- 
gether that our view ahead was restricted to a few 
yards. We were in the forest. There was a pale 
tinge of day, but its origin was uncertain, for over- 
head no foliage could be seen, but only deep shadows 
from which long ropes were hanging without life. 
In that obscurity were points of light, as if a high 
roof had lost some tiles. Hill set a course almost 
due south, and we went on, presently descending to 


/ 


328 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


a deep clear stream over which a tree had fallen. 
Shafts of daylight came down to us there, making 
the sandy bottom of the stream luminous, as by a 
lantern, and betraying crowds of small fishes. As 
we climbed the tree, to cross upon it, we disturbed 
several morphos. We had difficulties beyond in a 
hollow, where the bottom of the forest was lumbered 
with fallen trees, dry rubbish, and thorns, and once, 
stepping on what looked timber solid enough, its 
treacherous shell collapsed, and I went down into a 
cloud of dust and ants. In clearing this wreckage, 
which was usually as high as our faces, and doubly 
confused by the darkness, the involutions of dead 
thorny creepers, and clouds of dried foliage, Hills 
got at fault with our direction, but reassured him- 
self, though I don’t know how—but I think with the 
certain knowledge that if we went south long 
enough we should strike the Madeira somewhere— 
and on we went. For hours we continued among 
the trees, seldom knowing what was ahead of us for 
any distance, surviving points of noise intruding 
again after long in the dusk of limbo. So still and 
nocturnal was the forest that it was real only when 
its forms were close. All else was phantom and of 
the shades. ‘There was not a green sign of life, and 
not a sound. Resting once under a tree I began to 
think there was a conspiracy implied in that murk 
and awful stillness, and that we should never come 
out again into the day and see a living earth. Hills 
sat looking out, and said, as if in answer to an un- 
spoken thought of mine which had been heard be- 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 320 


cause there was less than no sound there, that men 
who were lost in those woods soon went mad. 

Then he led on again. This forest was nothing 
like the paradise a tropical wild is supposed to be. It 
was as uniformly dingy as the old stones of a Lon- 
don street on a November evening. We did not see 
a movement, except when the morphos started from 
the uprooted tree. Once I heard the whistle call 
us from the depths of the forest, urgent and star- 
tling; and now when in a London by-way I hear a 
boy call his mate in a shrill whistle, it puts about me 
again the spectral aisles, and that unexpectant quiet 
of the sepulchre which is more than mere absence of 
sound, for the dead who should have no voice. This 
central forest was really the vault of the long-for- 
gotten, dank, mouldering, dark, abandoned to the 
accumulations of eld and decay. The tall pillars 
rose, upholding night, and they might have been 
bastions of weathered limestone and basalt, for they 
were aS grim as ancient and ruinous masonry. 
There was no undergrowth. The ground was hid- 
den in a ruin of perished stuff, uprooted trees, 
parchments of leaves, broken boughs, and mummied 
husks, the iron globes of nuts, and pods. There was 
no day, but some breaks in the roof were points of 
remote starlight. The crowded columns mounted 
straight and far, almost branchless, fading into in- 
distinction. Out of that overhead obscurity hung a 
wreckage of distorted cables, binding the trees, and 
often reaching the ground. The trees were seldom 
of great girth, though occasionally there was a dom- 


3390 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


inant basaltic pillar, its roots meandering over the 
floor like streams of old lava. ‘The smooth ridges 
of such a fantastic complexity of roots were some- 
times breast high. The walls ran up the trunk, pro- 
jecting from it as flat buttresses, for great heights. 
We would crawl round such an occupying struc- 
ture, diminished groundlings, as one would move 
about the base of a foreboding, plutonic building 
whose limits and meaning were ominous and baf- 
fling. There were other great trees with compound 
boles, built literally of bundles of round stems, intri- 
cate gothic pillars, some of the props having fused in 
places. Every tree was the support of a parasitic 
community, lianas swathing it and binding it. One 
vine moulded itself to its host, a flat and wide com-. 
press, as though it were plastic. We might have 
been witnessing what had been a riot of manifold . 


and insurgent life. It had been turned to stone .— 


when in the extreme pose of striving violence. It - 
was all dead now. 

But what if these combatants had only paused as: 
we appeared? It was a thought which came to me. 
The pause might be but an appearance for our de- © 
ception. Indeed, they were all fighting as we passed - 
through, those still and fantastic shapes, a war ruth- 
less but slow, in which the battle day was ages long. 
They seemed but still. We were deceived. If time 
had been accelerated, if the movements in that war 
of phantoms had been speeded, we should have seen 
what really.was there, the greater trees running up- 
wards to starve the weak of light and food, and 
heard the continuous collapse of the failures, and 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 331 


have seen the lianas writhing and constricting, man- 
ifestly like serpents, throttling and eating their 
hosts. We did see the dead everywhere, shells with 
the worms at them. Yet it was not easy to be sure 
that we saw anything at all, for these were not trees, 
but shapes in a region below the day, a world sunk 
abysmally from the land of living things, to which 
light but thinly percolated down to two travellers 
moving over its floor, trying to get out to their own 
place. 

Late in the afternoon we were surprised by a 
steep hill in our way, where the forest was more 
open. Palms became conspicuous on the slopes, and 
the interior of the sombre woods was lighted with 
bright and graceful foliage. The wild banana was 
frequent, its long rippling pennants showing every- 
where. The hill rose sharply, perhaps for six hun- 
dred feet, and over its surface were scattered large 
stones, and stones are rare indeed in this land of 
vegetable humus. ‘They were often six inches in 
diameter, and I should have said they were water- 
worn but that I had seen them in situ at one camp, . 
where they occurred but little below the surface in a 
friable sandstone, the largest of them easily broken 
in the hand, for they were but ferrous concretions 
of quartz grains. After exposure to the air they so 
hardened that they could be fractured only with 
difficulty. We kept along the ridge of the hill, 
finding breaks in the forest through which, as 
through unexpected windows, we could see, for a 
wonder, over the roof of the forest, looking out of 
our prison to a wide world where the sun was de- 


332 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


clining. In the south-west we caught the gleam of 
the Madeira, and beyond it saw a continuation of 
the range of hills on which we stood. 

In the low ground between the hill range and the’ 
river the forest was lower, and was so tangled a mass 
that I doubted whether we could make a way 
through it. We happened upon a deserted Cari- 
puna village, three large sheds, without sides, each 
but a ragged thatch propped on four legs. The 
clearing was just large enough to hold them. I 
could find no relics of the forest folk about. Damp 
leaves were thick on the floor of each shelter. But 
it was lucky we found the huts, for thence a trail 
led us to the river. We emerged suddenly from the 
forest, Just as one goes through a little door into 
the open street. We were on the bank of the Ma- 
deira by the upper falls of the Caldeirao. It was 
still a great river, with the wall of the forest op- 
- posite, just above which the sunset was flaming, so 
far away that its tree trunks were but vertical lines 
of silver in dark cliffs. A track used by the Bo- 
livian rubber boatmen led us down stream to the 
camp by the lower falls. 

It was night when we got to the three huts of the 
camp, and the river could not be seen, but it was 
heard, a continuous low thundering. Sometimes a 
greater shock of deep waters falling, an orgasm of 
the flood pouring unseen, more violent than the 
rest, made the earth tremulous, Men held up lan- 
terns to our faces, and led us to a hut. It was but 
the usual roof of leaves. We rested in hammocks 
slung between the posts, and I ached in every limb. 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 333 


But here we were at last; and there is no more 
luxurious bed than a hammock, yielding and re- 
silient, as though you were cradled on air; and there 
is no pipe like that smoked in a hammock at night 
in the tropics after a day of toil and anxiety in a 
dissolving heat, for the heat makes a pipe bitter and 
impossible; but if a tropic night is cool and cloudless 
it comes like a benediction, and the silence is a peace 
that is below you and around, and as high as the 
stars towards which your face is turned. The ropes 
of the hammock creaked. Sometimes a man spoke 
quietly, as though he were at a great distance. The 
sound of the water receded, was heard only as in a 
sleep, and it might have been the loud murmur of 
the spinning globe, heard because we had left this 
world and had leisure for trifles in a securer world 
apart. 

In the morning, while they prepared the little 
steam launch for its journey down the rapids, I had 
time to climb about the smooth granite boulders of 
the foreshore below the hut. A rock is so unusual 
in this country that it is a luxury when found. The 
granite was bare, but in its crevices grew cacti and 
other plants with fleshy leaves and swollen stems. 
Shadowing the hut was a tree bearing trumpet- 
shaped flowers, and before the blossoms humming 
birds were hovering, glowing and evanescent mor- 
sels, remaining miraculously suspended when in- 
serting their long bills mto the flowers, their little 
wings beating so rapidly that the air seemed visible 
and radiant about them. Another tree here inter- 
ested me, for it was Bates Assacu, the only one I 


334 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


saw. It was a large tree, with palmate leaves hav- 
ing seven fingers. Ugly spines studded even its 
brown trunk. 

I looked out on the river dubiously. A rocky 
island was just off shore, crowned with trees. Be- 
tween us and the island, and beyond, the waters 
heaved and circled, evidently of great depth, and 
fearfully disturbed and swift. It looked all its 
name, the Caldeirao do Inferno—hell’s cauldron. 
There was not much white and broken water. But 
its surface was always changing, whirlpools forming 
and revolving, then disappearing in long wrenched 
strands of water. Sometimes a big tree would leap 
out of the water, as though it had travelled upwards 
from the bottom, and then would vanish again. 

We set out upon it, with an engineman and two 
half-breeds, and went off obliquely for mid-stream. — 
The engineman and navigator was a fair-haired 
German. If the river had been sane and usual I 
should have had my eyes on the forest which stood 
along each shore, for few white men had ever looked 
upon it. But the river took our minds, and never 
in bad weather in the western ocean have I seen — 
water so full of menace. Yet below the falls it was 
silent and unbroken. It was its smooth swiftness, 
its strange checks and mysterious and deep convul- 
sions, as though the river bed itself was insecure, 
the startling whirlpools which appeared without 
warning, circling depressions on the surface in which 
our launch would have been but a straw, which 
shocked the mind. It was stealthy and noiseless. 
The water was but an inch or two below our gun- 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 335 


wale. Wesaw trees afloat, greater and heavier than 
our midget of a craft, shooting down the gently 
inclined shining expanse just as we were, and ex- 
press; and then, as if an awful hand had grasped 
them from below, they were pulled under, and we 
saw them no more; or, again, and near to us and 
ahead, a tree bole would shoot from below like an 
arrow, though no tree had been drifting there. The 
shores were far away. 

The water ahead grew worse. The German 
crouched by his little throbbing engine, looking 
anxiously—I could see his fixed stare—over the 
bows. We were travelling indeed now. ‘The boat, 
in a rapid tremor, and oscillating violently, was 
clutched at the keel by something which coiled 
strongly about us, gripped us, and held us; and the 
boat, mad and terrified, in an effort to escape, made 
a circuit, the water lipping at her gunwale and com- 
ing over the bows. The river seemed poised a foot 
above the bows, ready to pour in and swamp us. 
The German tried to get her head down stream. 
Hills began tearing at his ammunition belt, and I 
stooped and tugged at my boot laces... . 

The boat jumped, as if released. The German 
turned round on us grinning. “It ees all right,” 
he said. He began to roll a cigarette nervously. 
“We pull it off all right,” said the German, wetting 
his cigarette paper. The boat was free, dancing 
lightly along. The little engine was singing quickly 
and freely. : 

The Madeira here was as wide as in its lower 
reaches, with many islands. There were hosts of 


336 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


waterfowl. We landed once at a rubber hunter’s 
sitio on the right bank. Its owner, a Bolivian, 
and his pretty Indian wife, who had tattoo marks on 
her forehead, made much of us, and gave us coffee. 
They had an orchard of guavas, and there, for it was 
long since I had tasted fruit, I was an immoderate 
thief, in spite of a pet curassow which followed me 
through the garden with distracting pecks. The 
Rio Jaci-Parana, a black-water stream, opened up 
soon after we left the sitio. The boundary between 
the clay-coloured flood of the Madeira and the dark 
water of the tributary was straight and distinct. 
From a distance the black water seemed like ink, 
but we found it quite clear and bright. The Jaci is 
not an important branch river, but it was, at this 
period of the rains, wider than the Thames at Rich- 
mond, and without doubt very much deeper. The 
appearance of the forest on the Jaci was quite dif- 
ferent from the palisades of the parent stream. On 
the Madeira there is commonly a narrow shelf of 
bank, above which the jungle rises as would a sheer © 
cliff. The Jaci had no banks. The forest was 
deeply submerged on either side, and whenever an 
opening showed in the woods we could see the 
waters within, but could not see their extent because 
of the interior gloom. The outer foliage was awash, 
and mounted, not straight, but in rounded clouds. 
For the first time I saw many vines and trees in 
flower, presumably because we were nearer the roof 
of the woods. One tree was loaded with the pendent 
pear-shaped nests of those birds called “hang nests,” 
and scores of the beauties in their black and gold 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 337 


plumage were busy about their homes, which re- 
sembled monstrous fruits. Another tree was 
weighted with large racemes of orange-coloured 
blossoms, but as the launch passed close to it we dis- 
covered the blooms were really bundles of cater- 
pillars. The Jaci appeared to be a haunt of the alli- 
gators, but all we saw of them was their snouts, 
which moved over the surface of the water out of 
our way like rubber balls afloat and mysteriously 
propelled. I had a sight, too, of that most regal 
of the eagles, the harpy, for one, well within view, 
lifted from a tree ahead, and sailed finely over the 
river and away. 

That night I slept again in my old hut at the Jaci 
camp, and with Hill and another official set off 
early next morning for the construction camp on 
Rio Caracoles, which we hoped to reach before the 
commissary train left for Porto Velho. At Porto 
Velho the “Capella” was, and I wished, perhaps as 
much as I have ever wished for anything, that I 
should not be left behind when she departed. I 
knew she must be on the point of sailing. 

My two companions had reasons of their own for 
thinking the catching of that train was urgently 
necessary. In our minds we were already settled 
and safe in a waggon, comfortable among the 
empty boxes, going back to the place where the 
crowd was. But still we had some way to ride; and, 
IT must tell you, I was now possessed of all I de- 
sired of the tropical forest, and had but one fixed 
idea in my dark mind, but one bright star shining 
there; I had turned about, and was going home, and 


338 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


now must follow hard and unswervingly that star 
in the east of my mind. The rhythmic movements 
of the mule under me—only my legs knew he was 
there—formed in my darkened mind a refrain: get 
out of it, get out of it. 

And at last there were the huts and tents of the 
Caracoles, still and quiet under the vertical sun. 
No train was there, nor did it look a place for trains. 
My steamer was sixty miles away, beyond a track 
along which further riding was impossible, and 
where walking, for more than two miles, could not 
be even considered. ‘The train, the boys told us 
blithely, went back half an hour before. The audi- 
ence of trees regarded my consternation with the 
indifference which I had begun to hate with some 
passion. ‘The boys naturally expected that we 
should take it in the right way for hot climates, 
without fuss, and that now they had some new gos- 
sip for the night. But they should have understood 
Hill better. My tall gaunt leader waved them aside, 
for he was a man who could do things, when there 
seemed nothing that one could do. “The terminus — 
or bust!” he cried. “Where’s the boss?’ He de- 
manded a handcart and a crew. I thought he spoke 
in jest. A hand-cart is a contrivance propelled 
along railway metals by pumping at a handle. The 
handle connects with the wheels by a crank and 
cogs through a slot in the centre of the platform, 
and you get five miles an hour out of it, while the - 
crew continues. For sixty miles, in that heat, it 
was impossible. Yet Hill persisted; the cart was 
put on the metals, five half-breeds manned the 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 339 


pump handle, three facing the track ahead, two 
with their backs to it. We three passengers sat on 
the sides and front of the trolley. Away we went. 

The boys cheered and laughed, calling out to us 
the probabilities of our journey. We trundled 
round a corner, and already I had to change my 
cramped position; fifty-eight miles to go. We sat 
with our legs held up out of the way of the vines 
and rocks by the track, and careful to remember 
that our craniums must be kept clear of the pump 
handle. The crew went up and down, with fixed 
looks. ‘The sun was the eye of the last judgment, 
and my lips were cracked. The trees made no sign. 
The natives went up and down; and the forest went 
by, tree by tree. 

My tired and thoughtless legs dropped, and a 
thorn fastened its teeth instantly in my boots, and 
nearly had me down. ‘The trees went by, one by 
one. ‘There was a large black and yellow butterfly 
on a stone near us. I was surprised when no sound 
came as it made a grand movement upwards. Then, 
in the heart of nowhere, the trolley slackened, and 
came to a stand. We had lost a pin. Half a mile 
back we could hardly credit we really had found 
that pin, but there it was; and the men began to 
go up and down again. Hill got a touch of fever, 
and the natives had changed to the colour of im- 
pure tallow, and flung their perspiration on my 
face and hands as they swung mechanically. The 
poor wretches! We were done. ‘The sun weighed 
untold tons. 

But the sun declined, some monkeys began to 


340 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


howl, and the sunset tempest sprang down on us its 
assault, shaking the high screens on either hand, 
and the rain beat with the roll of kettle-drums. 
Then we got on an up grade, and two of the spent 
natives collapsed, their chests heaving. So I and 
the other chap stood up in the night, looked to the 
stars, from which no help could be got, took hold of 
the pump handle like gallant gentlemen, and tried 
to forget there were twenty miles to go. Away 
we went, jog, jog, uphill. I thought that gradient 
would not end till my heart and head had burst; 
but it did, just in time. 

We gathered speed on a down grade. We flew. 
Presently the man with the fever yelled, “The 
brake, the brake!” But the brake was broken. The 
trolley was not running, but leaping in the dark. 
Every time it came down it found the metals. A 
light was coming towards us on the line; and the 
others prepared to jump. I could not even see that 
light, for my back was turned to our direction, and 
I could not let go the flying handle, else would all 
control have gone, and also I should have been 
smashed. I shut my eyes, pumped swiftly and in- 
voluntarily, and waited for doom to hit me in 
the back. The blow was a long time coming. Then 
Hill's gentle voice remarked, “All right, boys, it’s 
a firefly.” 

. . » I became only a piece of machinery, and 
pumped, and pumped, with no more feeling than a 
bolster. Shadows undulated by us everlastingly. 
I think my tongue was hanging out... . 


ge: a : < 
EE ee 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 341 


Lights were really seen at last. Kind hands lifted 
us from the engine of torture; and I heard the re- 
membered voice of the Skipper, “Is he there? I 
thought it was a case.” 


That night of my return a full moon and a placid 
river showed me the “Capella” doubled, as in a 
mirror, and admiring the steamer’s deep inverted 
shape I saw a heartening portent—I saw steam 
escaping from the funnel which was upside down. 
A great joy filled me at that, and I turned to the 
Skipper, as we strode over the ties of the jetty. 
“Yes. We go home to-morrow,” he said. The 
bunk was super-heated again by the engine room, 
but knowing the glad reason, I endured it with 
pleasure. To-morrow we turned about. 

Yet on the morrow there was still the persist- 
ence of the spacious idleness which encompassed us 
impregnably, beyond which we could:not go. The 
little that was left of the fuel in the holds went out 
of us with dismal unhaste. The Skipper and the 
mates fumed, and the Doctor took me round to see 
the “Capella’s” pets, so that we might fill up time. 
A monkey, an entirely secular creature once with us, 
had died while I was away. It was well. He had 
no name; Vice was his name, There were no tears 
at his death, and Tinker the terrier began to get 
_back some of his full and lively form again after 
that day when, in a sudden righteous revolution, he 
slew, and barbarously mangled, the insolent tyrant 
of the ship. ‘The monkey had feared none but 


342 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


Mack, our red, blue and yellow macaw, a monstrous 
and resplendent fowl in whose iron }ill even Brazil 
nuts were soft. 

But we all respected Mack. He was the wisest 
thing on the ship. If an idle man felt high-spirited 
and approached Mack to demonstrate his humour, 
that great bird gave an inquiring turn to its head, 
and its deliberate and unwinking eyes hid the rapid 
play of its prescient mind. Theman stopped, and 
would speak but playfully. Nobody ever dared. 

When Mack first boarded the ship, a group of us, 
gloved, smothered him with a heavy blanket and 
fastened a chain to his leg. He-knew he was over- 
powered, and did not struggle, but inside the 
blanket we heard some horrible chuckles. We took 
off the blanket and stood back expectantly from 
that dishevelled and puzzling giant of a parrot. He 
shook his feathers flat again, quite self-contained, 
looked at us sardonically and murmured “Gur-r-r” 
very distinctly; then glanced at his foot. There was 
a little surprise in his eye when he saw the chain 
there. He lifted up the chain to examine it, tried 
it, and then quietly and easily bit it through. 
“Gur-r-r!” he said again, straightening his vest, still 
regarding us solemnly. Then he moved off to a 
davit, and climbed the mizzen shrouds to the top- 
mast. : 

When he saw us at food he came down with non- 
chalance, and overlooked our table from the cross 
beam of an awning. Apparently satisfied, he came 
directly to the mess table, sitting beside me, and 
took his share with all the assurance of a member, 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 343 


allowing me to idle with his beautiful wings and his 
tail. He was a beauty. He took my finger in his 
awful bill and rolled it round like a cigarette. I 
wondered what he would do to it before he let it go; 
but he merely let it go. He was a great character, 
magnanimously minded. I never knew a tamer 
creature than Mack. That evening he rejoined a 
flock of his wild brothers in the distant tree-tops. 
But he was back next morning, and put everlasting 
fear into the terrier, who was at breakfast, by sud- 
denly appearing before him with wings outspread 
on the deck, looking like a disrupted and angry 
rainbow, and making raucous threats. ‘The dog 
gave one yell and fell over backwards. 

We had added a bull-frog to our pets, and he 
must have weighed at least three pounds. He had 
neither vice nor virtue, but was merely a squab in a 
shady corner. Whenever the dog approached him 
he would rise on his legs, however, and inflate him- 
self till he was globular. This was incomprehen- 
sible to Tinker, who was contemptuous, but being a 
little uncertain, would make a circuit of the frog. 
Sitting one day in the shadow of the box which en- 
closed the rudder chain was the frog, and we were 
near, and up came Tinker a-trot all unthinking, his 
nose to the deck. ‘The frog hurriedly furnished his 
pneumatic act when Tinker, who did not know frog- 
gie was there, was close beside him, and Tinker 
snapped sideways ina panic. Poor punctured frog- 
gie dwindled instantly, and died. 

I could add to the list of our creatures the ana- 
conda which was found coming aboard by the gang- 


3.44. THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


‘way but that a stoker saw him first, became hysteri- 
cal, and slew the reptile with a shovel; there were the 
coral snakes which came inboard over the cables 
and through the hawse pipes, and the vampire bats 
which frequented the forecastle. But they’ are in- 
significant beside our peccary. I forgot to tell you 
the Skipper never made a tame creature of her. 
She refused us. We brought her up from the 
bunkers where first she was placed, because the 
stokers flatly refused her society in the dark. She 
was brought up on deck in bonds, snapping her 
tushes in a direful way, and when released did most 
indomitably charge all our ship’s company, bristles 
up, and her automatic teeth louder and more rapid 
than ever. How we fled! When I turned on my 
vantage, the manner of my getting there all un- 
known, to see who was my neighbour, it was my 
abashed and elderly captain, who can look upon 
sea weather at its worst with an easy eye, but who 
then was striving desperately to get his legs (which 
were in pyjamas) ten feet above the deck, in case 
the very wild pig below had wings. | 
After the peccary was released we could not call 
the ship ours. We crept about as thieves. It was 
fortunate that she always gave warning of her prox- 
imity by making the noise of castanets with her 
tusks, so that we had timesto get elevated before 
she arrived. But I never really knew how fast she 
could move till I saw her chase the dog, whom she 
despised and ignored. One morning his valiant 
barking at her, from a distance he judged to be 
adequate, annoyed her, and she shot at him like a 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 345 


projectile. Her slender limbs and diminutive 
hooves were those of a deer, and they became merely 
a haze beneath her body, which was a flying passion. 
The terrified dog had no chance, but just as she 
closed with him her feet slipped, and so Tinker’s 
life was saved. 

Her end was pitiful. One day she got into the 
saloon. The Doctor and I were there, and saw her 
trot in at one door, and we trotted out at another 
door. Now, the saloon was the pride of the Skip- 
per; and when the old man tried to bribe her out of 
it—he talked to her from the open skylight above 
—and she insulted him with her mouth, he sent for 
his men. From behind a shut door of the saloon 
alley way we heard a fusilade of tusks in the saloon, 
shrieks from the maddened dog, uproar from the 
parrots, and the hoarse shouts of the crew. The pig 
was charging ten ways at once. Stealing a look 
from the cabin we saw the boatswain appear with a 
bunch of cotton waste, soaked in kerosene, blazing 
at the end of a bamboo, and the mate with a knife 
lashed to another pole. The peccary charged the 
lot. There broke out the cries of Tophet, and 
through chaos champed insistently the high note of 
the tusks. She was noosed and caged; but nothing 
could be done with the little fury, and when I 
peeped in at her a few days later she was full length, 
and dying. She opened one glazing eye at me, and 
snapped her teeth slowly, game to the end. 


March 6.—It was reported at breakfast that we 
sail to-morrow. ‘The bread was sour, the butter 


i 
346 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


was oil, the sugar was black with flies, the sausages 
were tinned and very white and dead, and the bacon 
was all fat. And even the awning could not keep 
the sun away. 

March %.—We got the hatches on number four 
hold. It is reported we sail to-morrow. 

March 8.—The ship was crowded this night with 
the boys, for a last jollification. We fired rockets, 
and swore enduring friendships with anybody, and 
many sang different songs together. It is reported 
that we sail to-morrow. 

March 9.—It is reported that we sail to-morrow. 

March 10.—The “Capella” has come to life. The 
master is on the bridge, the first mate is on the fore- 
castle head, the second mate is on the poop, and the 
engineers are below. ‘There are stern and minatory 
cries, and men who run. At the first slow clanking 
of the cable we raised wild cheers. The ship’s body 
began to tremble, and there was thunder under her 
counter. We actually came away from the jetty, 
where long we had seemed a fixture. We got into 
mid-stream—stopped; slowly turned tail on Porto 
Velho. There was old man Jim, diminished on the 
distant jetty, waving his hat. Porto Velho looked 
strange again. Away we went. We reached the 
bend of the river, and turned the corner. There was 
the last we shall ever see of Porto Velho. Gone! 

The forest unfolding in reverse order seemed 
brighter, and all would have been quite well, but 
the fourth engineer came up from his duty, and fell 
insensible. He was very yellow, and the Doctor 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 347 


had work todo. Here was the first of our company 
to succumb to the country. 

There were but six more days of forest; for the 
old “Capella,” empty and light as a balloon, the 
collisions with the floating timber causing muffled 
thunder in her hollow body, came down the swift 
floods of the Madeira and the Amazon rivers “like 
a Cunarder, at sixteen knots,” as the Skipper said. 
And there on the sixth day was Para again, and 
the sea near. Our spirits mounted, released from 
the dead weight of heat and silence. But I was to 
lose the Doctor at Para, for he was then to return to 
Porto Velho, having discharged his duty to the 
“Capella’s” company. ‘The Skipper took his wallet, 
and we went ashore with him, he to his day-long 
task of clearing his vessel, and we for a final sad 
excursion. Much later in the day, suspecting an 
unnameable evil was gathering to my undoing, I 
called at the agent’s office, and found the Skipper 
had returned to the ship, that she was sailing that 
night, and, the regulations of Para bemg what they 
were, it being after six in the evening I could not 
leave the city till next morning. My haggard and 
dismayed array of thoughts broke in confusion and 
left me gibbering, with not one idea for use. With- 
out saying even good-bye to my old comrade I took 
to my heels, and left him; and that was the last I 
saw of the Doctor. (Aha! my staunch support in 
the long, hot and empty time at the back of things, 
where were but trees, bad food, and a jest to brace 


348 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


our souls, if ever you should see this—How!—and 
know, dear lad, I carried the damnable regulations 
and a whole row of officials, the Union Jack at the 
main, firing every gun as I bore down on them. I 
broke through. Only death could have barred me 
from my ship and the way home.) 

Next morning we were at sea. We dropped the 
pilot early and changed our course to the north, 
bound for Barbados. ‘Though on the line, the dif- 
ference in the air at sea, after our long enclosure 
in the rivers of the forest, was keenly felt. And the 
ship too had been so level and quiet; but here she 
was lively again, full of movements and noises. 
The bows were at their old difference with the sky- 
line, and the steady wind of the outer was driving 
over us. Before noon, when I went in to the Chief, 
my crony was flat and moribund with a temperature 
at 105°, and he had no interest in this life whatever. 
I had added the apothecary’s duties to those of the 
Purser, and here found my first job. (Doctor, I 
gave him lots of grains of quinine, and lots more 
afterwards; and plenty of calomel when he was at 
98 again. Was that all right?) 

The sight of the big and hearty Chief, wien he 
was about once more, yellow, insecure, and some- 
what shrunken, made us dubious. Yet now were 
we rolling home. She was breasting down into a 
creaming smother, the seas were blue, and the world 
was fresh and wide all the way back. ‘There was 
one fine night, as we were climbing slowly up the 
slope of the globe, when we lifted the whole con- 
stellation of the Great Bear, the last star of the tail 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE ~— 349 


just dipping below the seas, straight over the “Ca- 
pella’s” bows, as she pitched. ‘Then were we as- 
sured affairs were rightly ordered, and slept well 
and contented. 


Late one afternoon we sighted Barbados. The 
sea was dark and the light was golden. The island 
did not look like land. It was a faint but constant 
pearl-coloured cloud. The empty sky came down 
to the dark sea in bright walls which had but a 
bloom of azure. Overhead it was day,-but the sea 
was fluid night. Above the island was a group of 
cirrus, turned to the setting sun like an audience 
of intent faces. Near to starboard was a white ship, 
fully rigged, standing towards the island with 
royals set, and even a towering main skysail. Tall 
as she was, she looked but a multiple cloud which 
had dropped from the sky, and had settled on the 
dark sea, and over it was drifting in a faint air, 
buoyant, but unable to lift. We overhauled that 
stately ship. She was reflecting the day-fall from 
the white rounds of her many sails. She was regal, 
she was paramount in her world, and the sun seemed 
to be watching her, and shining solely for her 
illustrious progress. The clarity and the peace of 
it was in us as we leaned against the rail, watching 
Barbados grow, and watching that exalted ship. 
“This is all right,” said the Chief. 

We were coming to the things we knew and un- 
derstood. In the island near us were men, quays, 
and shops. This evening had a familiar and friendly 
look. Barbados at last! There would be some- 


350 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


thing to eat, too, and we kept talking of that. Do 
you know what good bread-and butter tastes like? 
Or mealy baked potatoes? Or fruit from which the 
juice runs when you bite? Or crisp salads? Not 
you; not if you haven’t lived for long on tinned 
stuffs, bread which smelt like vinegar, and butter to 
which a spoon had to be used. 

To the door of the saloon alley way we saw the 
steward come, and begin to swing his bell. “Tea 
ho!” said the mate. “Keep it,” said the Chief. “I 
know it. Sardines and hash. Not for me. We 
shall get some grub in the morning. Oranges and 
bananas, boys. I’m tired of oil. My belt is in by 
three holes.” 

When the sun once touched the sea it sank visibly, 
like a weight. Night came at once. We passed a 
winking light, and soon ahead of us in the dark 
was grouped a multitude of lower stars. That was 
Bridgetown. ‘Those stars opened and spread round 
us, showing nothing of the wall of night in which 
they were fixed. Well, there it was. We could 
smell the good land. We should see it in the morn- 
ing. We had really got there. 

The engines stopped. There was a shout from 
the steamer’s bridge and a thunderous rumbling as 
the cable ran out, and then a remarkable quiet. The 
old man came sideways down the bridge ladder with 
a hurricane lamp, and stood with us, striking a light 
for his cigar. “Here we are, Chief,” he said. 
“What about coals in the morning?’ The night 
was hot, there was no wind, and as we sat yarning 
on the bunker hatch another cluster of stars moved 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 351 


in swiftly together, came to a stand near us, and a 
peremptory gun was fired. That was the British 
mail steamer. 

We looked at her with awe. We could see the 
toffs in evening dress idling in the glow of her 
electric lights. What a feed they had just finished! 
But the greatest wonder of her deck was the women 
in white gowns. We could hear the strange 
- Jaughter of the women, and listened for it. That 
was music worth listening to. Our little mob of 
toughs in turns used the night glasses on those wo- 
men, and in a dead silence. There were some kid- 
dies, too. 

We were looking at the benign lights of the island 
and trying to make out what they meant. The 
sense of our repose, and the touch of those warm 
and velvet airs, and the scent of land, were like the 
kindness and security of home. “I know this place,” 
drawled Sandy. “I was here once. Before I went 
into steam I used to come out to the islands, when 
I was a young ’un. I made two voyages in the 
‘Chocolate Girl. She was my first ship. She was 
a daisy, too. Once we lifted St. Vincent twenty-five 
days but of Liverpool. That was going, if you like. 
If old Wager—he was the old man of the ‘Choco- 
late Girl’—if he could only get a trip in a ship like 
this, like an iron street with a factory stack in the 
middle! But he can’t. He’s dead. He had the 
‘Mignonette,’ and she went missing among the 
Bahamas. There’s millions of islands in the Ba- 
hamas. They’re north of this place. You couldn’t 
visit all those islands in a lifetime. 


362 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


“If you ask me, some of the islands in these seas 
are very funny. ‘There’s something wrong about a 
few of them. They’re not down in the chart, so 
I’ve heard. One day you lift one, and you never 
knew it was there. “What’s that” says the old man. 
‘Can’t make that place out.’ Then he reckons he’s 
found new land, and takes his position. He calls 
it after his wife, and cables home what he’s done. 
The next thing is a gunboat goes there and beats 
about and lays over the spot, but she doesn’t find 
no island. The gunboat cables home that the mer- 
chant chap was drunk or something, and that he 
steamed over the spot and got hundreds of fathoms. 
They’re always so clever, in the navy. But I’ve 
heard some of these islands are not right. You see 
one once, and nobody ever sees it again. 

-“T knew a man, and he was marooned on one of 
those islands. He sailed with me afterwards on one 
of the Blue Anchor steamers to Sydney. One time 
he was on a craft out of Martinique for Cuba. She 
was a schooner of the islands, and fine vessels they 
are. You'll see a lot about usin the morning. This 
man’s name was Moffat—Bill Moffat. His 
schooner had a mulatto for a master, and that nig- 
ger was a fool and very superstitious, by all ac- 
counts. ‘They ran short of water, and it’s pretty 
bad if you fall short of water in these seas. Off the 
regular routes there’s nothing. You might drift 
for weeks, and see nothing, off the track. 

“Then they sighted an island. The mulatto chap 
pretended he knew all about that island. He said 
he had been there before. But he was a liar. It 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 353 


was only a little island, like some trees afloat. They | 
came down on it, and anchored in ten fathoms and 
waited for daylight. 

“Next morning some wind freshened off shore, 
and Moffat takes a nigger and rows to the beach. 
There was only a light swell breaking on the coral, 
and landing was easy. Moffat told the nigger to 
stay by the boat while he took a look round. There 
was a bit of a coral beach with a pile of high rocks 
at the ends of it, like pillars each side of a door-step. 
What was inside the island Moffat couldn’t see, 
because at the back of the beach was a wood. He 
said he heard a sound like a bird calling, but he 
reckoned there wasn’t a soul in that place. The 
schooner was riding just off. He turned and was 
crunching his way up the coral with the idea of 
looking for a way inside. He got to the trees, and 
then heard the nigger shout in a fright. The black 
beggar was pushing out the boat. He got in it too, 
and began rowing back to the schooner as if some- 
body was coming after him. 

“Moffat yelled, and ran down to the surf, but the 
nigger kept right on. There was Moffat up to his 
knees in the water, and in a fine state. The boat 
reached the schooner—and now, thinks Moffat, 
there'll be trouble. Do you know what happened 
though? For a little while nothing happened. 
Then they began to haul in her cable. She up- 
anchored and stood out. That’s a fact. Bill told 
me he felt pretty sick when he saw it. He didn’t 
like the look of it. He watched the schooner turn 
tail, and soon she found more wind and got out of 


364 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


sight past the island, close-hauled. He watched her 
dance past one of the piles of rocks till there was 
nothing but empty sea behind the rock. Then his 
eye caught something moving on the rock. Some- 
thing moved round it out of his sight. He never 
saw what it was. He wished he had. 

“Well, he had a pretty bad time. He couldn't 
find anyone on the island, in a manner of speaking. 
But somebody was always going round a corner, or 
behind a tree. He caught them out of the tail of - 
his eye. He said it was enough to get on a man’s 
nerves the way that thing always just wasn’t theie, 
whatever it was. ‘Curse the goats,’ Bill used to say 
to himself. 

“One day Bill was strolling round figuring out 
what he could do to that mulatto when he met him 
again, and then he found a sea cave. He went in. 
It was a silly thing to do, because the way in was so 
low that he had to crawl. But the cave was big. 
enough inside for a music-hall. The walls ran up 
into a vault, and the water came up to the bottom 
of the walls nearly all round. The water was like a 
green light. A bright light came up through the 
water, and the reflections were wriggling all over 
the rocks, making them seem to shake. The water 
was like thick glass full of light. He could see a 
long way down, but not to the bottom. While he ~ 
was looking at it the water heaved up quietly full 
three feet, and the reflections on the walls faded. 
Then he saw the hole through which he had crawled 
was gone. ‘Now, Bill Moffat, you’re in a regular 
mess,’ he says to himself. 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 355 


“He dived for the hole. But he never found that 
way out, and the funny thing was he couldn’t come 
to the top again. Bill saw it was a proper case that 
time, and no more Sundays in Poplar. He was 
surprised to find that the deeper he went the thinner 
the water was. It was thin and clear, like electric 
light. He could see miles there, and down he kept 
falling till he hit the bottom with a bang. It scared 
a lot of fishes, and they flew up like birds. He 
looked up to see them go, and there was the sun 
overhead, only it was like a bright round of green 
jelly, all shaking. Bill found it was dead easy to 
_ breathe in water that was no thicker than air, so he 
got up, brushed the sand off, and looked round. A 
flock of fishes flew about him quite friendly, and as 
beautiful as Amazon parrots. A big crab walked 
ahead, and Bill thought he had better follow the 
crab. , 

“Fe came toa path which was marked with shells, 
and at the end of the path he saw the fore half of a 
ship up-ended. While he was looking at it, some- 
body pushed the curtains from the hatchway, and 
came out, and looked at him. ‘Good lord, it’s Davy 
Jones, said Bill ‘to himself. 

“Hullo, Bill, said Davy. ‘Come in. Glad to 
see you, Bill. What a time you've been.’ 

“Moffat said that Davy wasn’t a decent sight, 
having barnacles all over his face. But he shook 
hands. ‘You're hand is quite cold, Bill,’ said 
Davy. ‘Did you lose your soul coming along? You 
nearly did that before, Bill Moffat. You nearly 
did it that Christmas night off Ushant. I thought 


356 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


you were coming then. But not you. But here you 
are at last all right. Come in! Come in! 

“Bill went inside with Davy. There was sea junk 
all over the place. ‘I find these things very handy, 
old chap,’ said Davy to Bill, seeing he was looking 
at them. ‘It’s good of you to send them down, 
though I don’t like the iron, for it won’t stand the 
climate. See that old hat? It’s a Spanish ad- 
miral’s. I clap it on, backwards, whenever I want 
to go ashore.’ 

“So they sat down, and yarned about old times, 
though Bill told me that Davy seemed to remember 
people after everybody else had forgotten them, 
which was confusing. ‘Oh, yes,’ Davy would say, © 
‘old Johnson. Yes. He used to talk of me in a 
rare way. Hewasadog, was Johnson. I’ve heard 
him, many a time. But he’s changed since his ship 
came downstairs. He’s a better man. He’s not so 
funny as he was.’ 

“Then they had a pipe, and after a bit things 
began to drag. ‘Come into the garden, Bill,’ said 
Davy. ‘Come and have a look round.’ 

“All round the garden Bill noticed the name- 
boards of ships nailed up. Some of the names Bill 
knew, and some he didn’t, being Spanish. “What 
do you think of my collection?’ said Davy. “Ever — 
seen as fine a one? I lay you never have!’ 

“Then they came to a door. “Come in,’ said Davy. 
“This is my locker. Ever heard of my locker? 

“Bill said 1t was pretty dark inside. Just hight 
enough to see. But there was only miles and miles 
of crab-pots, all set out in rows, with a label on each. — 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 357 


“What do you think of that lot, Bill? asked Davy. 
‘IT shall have to get larger premises soon.’ Bill 
choked a bit, for the place smelt stale and seaweedy. 
“W hat’s in the crab-pots, Davy? said Bull. 

“Souls! said Davy. ‘But there’s a lot of trash, 
though now and then I get a good one. Here, now. 
See this? This is a fine one, though I mustn’t tell 
you where I got it. And people said he hadn’t got 
one. But I knew better, and there it is.’ 

“But Bill couldn’t see anything.in the pots. He 
could only hear a rustling, as if something was rub- 
bing on the wicker, or a twittering. At last Davy 
came to a new pot. ‘Do you know who’s in this one, 
Bill,’ he said. But Bill couldn’t guess. ‘Well, Bull, 
it’s your soul, and a poorer one I never see. It was 
_ hardly worth setting the pot for a soul like that.’ 
Then Davy began to shake the pot, and soon got 
wild. ‘Here, where the deuce has that soul gone,’ 
he said, and put his ear to the bars. Then he put 
the pot down and made a rush at Bill, to get it back; 
but Bill jumped backwards, got through the door, 
ran through the house, grabbed the admiral’s cocked 
hat, and clapped it on backwards. Then he shot 
out of the water at once, and found himself on the 
rocks outside the cave, with the cocked hat still on 
his head. He’s kept that hat ever since, and money 
-wouldn’t buy it.” 

When I woke next morning it was like waking 
to a great occasion. The tropic sun was blazing 
outside. The day seemed of a superior quality. 
An old negress shuffled by my cabin door, through 


358 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


which was a peep of the town across the harbour, 
and she had some necklaces of shells strung on one 
skinny black arm and carried a basket of oranges 
on the other. I jumped up, and bought all the or- 
anges. A boat came to our gangway and some of 
us went ashore. I don’t know what a man feels 
like who is released one fine day from imprisonment 
into the stream of his fellows, but I should think 
he is first a little stunned, and afterwards becomes 
like a child’s balloon in a breeze. 'The people we had 
met in the Brazils never laughed; and I myself had 
always felt that there we had been watched and 
followed unseen, that something was there, watch- 
ing us, waiting its time, knowing well it could get — 
us before we escaped. 

We were at last outside it and free. The anchor- 
age of Bridgetown seemed anarchic, after our level 
sombre experience, for the sea was a green light, © 
flashing and volatile, with white schooners driving 
upon it, negroes shouting and laughing over the 
bulwarks, or frantically hauling on the sheets. The © 
rushing water was crowded with leaping boats, all — 
gaudily painted; and even the sunshine, moving 
rapidly on quivering white sails and the white hulls 
buoyantly swinging, was a kind of shaking laughter. — 
Our negro boatmen sang as they rowed, when they © 
were not swearing at other boatmen. The world — 
had got wine in its head. 

We went to the Ice House, and bought English — 
beer. (Oh, the taste of beer!) In the brisk and 
sunny streets there were English women, cool, 
dainty, a little haughty, their dresses smelling of 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 359 


new linen, and they were looking in at shop win- 
dows. We had got our feet down on home pave- 
ments, and the streets had the newness and sparkle 
of holiday. “Hi, cabby!” 

He drove us along coral roads, under cocoanut 
palms, and there were golden hills (hills once 
more!) one way, and on the other hand was a beach 
glowing like white fire, with a sea beyond of a blue 
that was ultimate, profound, and as tense and as 
still as rapture. We came to a hotel where there 
was stiff napery, with creases in it, on a breakfast 
table. ‘There was a silver coffee-pot. There was 
sweet-smelling and crusty bread, butter in ice, and 
new milk. There was a heaped plate of fruit. 
There was a crystal jug filled with cold water and 
sunshine, and it threw a wavering light on the dam- 
ask. | 
We had some of everything. We ate for more 
than an hour, steadily. A man could not have done 
it alone, and without shame. ‘There was one su- 
perior lady tourist, with grey curls on her cheeks 
and a face like doom, and she sent for the manager, 
and asked if we were to breakfast there again. She 
wanted to know. The Chief begged me, as the 
youngest of the party, to go over and kiss her. But 
I pointed out that, seeing where we had come from, 
and what we had suffered, it was the plain duty of 
any really dear old soul to come over and kiss us 
on a morning like that. 

In the afternoon we were aboard again, waiting 
for the Skipper to return with the new orders. To 


360 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


what part of the world would the power in Leaden- 
hall Street now consign us? Sandy thought New 
Orleans; but we could rule that out, for there was 
no cotton just then. Pensacola was more likely, the 
Chief said, with a deck cargo of lumber for Ham- 
burg. That guess made the crowd glum. Winter 
in the Atlantic, she rolling her heart out, and the 
timber that was level with the engine-room casing 
groaning and straining at every roll—to dwell on 
that prospect was to feel a cold draught out of the 
Valley of Shadows. 

Two nigger boys were overside, diving for coins. 
You threw a coin—Brazil’s nickel muck, a handful 
worth nothing—and it went below oscillating, as 
though sentiently dodging the contorted and con- 
vulsive figure of the boy diving after it. The trans- 
parency of the fathoms was that of a denser air. 
When the sea was still, at the slack of the tides, 


this tropic anchorage was not like water. You did — 


not look upon it, but into it, being hardly aware of 
its surface. It was surprising to see our massive 
iron plates stand upright in it. We were still an 
ugly black bulk, as we were on the ditch water of 
Swansea, but our sea wagon had lost its look of 
squat heaviness. Even our iron ship was trans- 
muted, such was the lift and radiance of Barbados 
and its sea, into the buoyancy of the unsubstantial 
stuff of that scene about us, the low hills of greenish 
gold so delicate under the sky of malachite blue that 
you doubted whether mortals could walk there. 
Bridgetown was between those hills and the sea, a 
cluster of white cubes, with inconsequential touches 


Sn A ag en ee 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 261 


of scarlet, orange, and emerald. Beneath our keel 
was a boy who might have been flying there. 

On one side of the town was a belt of coral beach. 
It was a-fire, and the palms above the beach, with 
their secretive villas, and the green-gold hills be- 
yond, floated on that white glow. The sea below the 
beach was an incandescent green; it might have been 
burning through contact with the island. Then the 
sea spread down to us in areas of opaque violet and 
blue, till in the neighbourhood of the ship it became 
transparent and was but a denser atmosphere. You, 
in the hard and bitter north, on the exposed summit 
of the world where Polaris glitters in the forehead 
of a frozen god, hardly know what young and lus- 
cious stuff this earth is, where the constant sun and 
tepid rains and salt air have preserved its bloom 
and flush of abounding life. 

There came the Skipper’s boat, he in his shore- 
going white ducks and Panama hat in the stern 
sheets, his wallet in his hand. He knew that we 
all looked at him with assumed indifference, when 
he stepped among us on deck. That was his 
time to show he was the ship’s master. He feigned 
that we were not there. He turned to the chief 
mate: “All ready, Mr. Brown?’ “All ready, sir.” 
Then the master walked slowly, knowing our eyes 
were on his back, to his place aft, first going in to 
speak to the Chief. The Chief came out some min- 
utes after. “Tampa, boys,” said he. “Florida for 
phosphate, then home.” 

That evening we were on our way, and turned 
inwards through the line of the Caribbees, passing 


362 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


between the islands of St. Lucia and St. Vincent, 
high purple masses of rock, St. Lucia’s mass as- 
cending into cones. The Skipper had been to most 
of the West Indian islands, and remembered them, 
while I listened. We stood at the chart-room door, 
watching the islands across the evening seas. The 
sun, just above the sharply dark rim of ocean, 
touched the sea, and sank. A thin paring of silver 
moon had the sky to itself. I went into the chart- 
room; and the old man who, grim and sour as you 
might think him, mellows into confidential friend- 
liness when he has you to himself, spread his charts 
of the Spanish Main under the yellow lamp, which 
was a slow pendulum as she rolled, and he put his 
spectacles on his lean brown face, talked of unfre- 
quented cays, and of the negro islands, and debated 
which route we should take. 

The fourth morning at breakfast-time, was a 
burning day, with a sky almost cloudless, and a slow 
sea which had the surface of its rich blue deeps shot 
with turquoise lights, while fields of saffron gulf- 
weed stained it; and we had, close over our port 
bow, the most beautiful island in the world. It is 
useless to deny it, and to declare you know a better 
island. Can’t I see Jamaica now? I see it most 
plain. It descends abruptly from the meridian, 
pinnacles and escarpments trembling in the upper 
air with distance and delicate poise, and comes down 
in rolling forests and steep verdant slopes, where 
facets of bare rock glitter, to more leisurely open 
glades and knolls; and then, being not far from the 
sea, drops in sheer cliffs to where the white combers 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 363 


pulse. It is a jewel which smells like a flower. The 
“Capella” went close in till Port Antonio under 
the Blue Mountains was plain, and though I could 
see the few scattered houses, I could not see the 
narrow ledges where men could stand in such a steep 
land. We crawled over the blue floor in which that 
sea mountain is set, and cruised along, feeling very 
small, under the various and towering shape. For 
long I watched it, declaring continually that some 
day I must return. (And that is the greatest com- 
pliment a traveller on his way home can pay to any 
spot on earth.) | 

It faded as we drew northwards. .Over seas to 
the north was a long low stratum of permanent 
cloud, and beneath it was the faint presentiment of 
Cuba. Still we were in the spell of the very halcyon 
weather of old tales, with the world our own, though 
once this day there was a great rain burst, and the 
“Capella” was lost in falling water, her syren blar- 
ing. We neared the Cuban coast by the Isle of 
Pines, a pallid desert shore, apparently treeless and 
parched. The next morning we came to the western 
cape of the island, rounding it in company with a 
white island schooner, its crew of toughs watching 
-us from her shadeless deck; and changed our course 
almost due north. 

Now we were in the Gulf of Mexico, and soon 
upset its notoriously uncertain temper, for a 
“norther” met us and piped till it was a full gale, 
end-on, and it kicked up a nasty sea which flung 
about the empty “Capella” like a band-box. There 
was a night of it. Towards morning it eased up, 


364 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


and I woke to a serene sunrise, and found we were 
in the pale green water of coral soundings, with the 
Floridan pilot even then standing in to us, his tug 
bearing centrally on its bridge a gilded eagle with 
rampant wings. In a little while we were fast to 
the quarantine quay at Mullet Island, detained as 
a yellow fever suspect. The medica] officers boarded 
us, ranged amidships the “Capella’s” crowd from 
the master down, and put in the mouth of each of us 
a thermometer; and so for a time we stood ridicu- 
lously smoking glass cigarettes, One stoker was 
put aside, for he had a temperature. Then into the 
cabins, and the saloon, the forecastle, and into the 
holds, were put gallipots of burning sulphur, and 
the doors were closed. We became a great and 
dreadful stench; and I went ashore. 

There was a deserted beach of comminuted shells, 
its glare as bright as snow in sunshine. It was 
littered with the relics of old wrecks, with sea rub- 
bish, and the carapaces of crabs. Beyond the beach 
was a calcareous desert, with a scrub of palmetto 
and evergreen, and patches of flowering coreopsis 
and blue squills. Hadden by the scrub were shallow 
lagoons. It is hard to tell the sea from the land 
in warm and aqueous Florida, for sea and land so 
invade each other’s dominions. Water and land 
were asleep in the sun. I was alone in the island, 
and sat in a decaying boat by the shore of a lagoon 
where nothing moved but the little crabs playing 
hide and seek in the moist crevices of the boat, and 
the pelicans which sat round the interminable flat 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 305 


shores. Sometimes the pelicans woke, and yawned, 
and fanned the heat with great slow wings. 

In the early afternoon we were allowed to pro- 
ceed to Tampa, which we reached in three hours; 
and there we came once more to the press of the 
busy and indifferent world. The muddle of roofs 
and steeples of a great city were about us, and men 
met us and talked to us, but they had no leisure 
for interest in the wonders of the strange land from 
which we had come, and would not have cared if 
afterwards we were going to Gehenna. We made 
fast under a new structure of timber and iron which 
was something between a flour mill and the Tower 
of Babel, for it was wan and powdered, and full of | 
strange noises; and it had a habit of eating, in a 
mechanical way, an interminable length of railway 
trucks, wagon after wagon, one every minute. A 
great weariness and yearning filled me that night. 
The strangulating fumes of the sulphur clung to 
all the cabin, and puffed in clouds from the pillow 
when I changed sides; for the wagons clanked and 
banged till daylight. I sat up and beat my breast, 
and swore I would leave her and go home. The 
next morning that inexplicable structure beside us 
began from many mouths to vomit floods of pow- 
dered phosphate into us, and the “Cappella,” in and 
out, turned pale through an almost impalpable dust. 
Everybody took bronchitis and cursed Tampa and 
its phosphate. 

I spoke to the Skipper and the Chief about it, and 
they agreed that nobody would stop with her now, 


366 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


who could leave her; but that yet was I no pal to 
desert them. What about them? They had yet 
to see her safe across the most ruthless of seas at a 
time when its temper would be at its worst; and 
what about them? ‘Though they admitted that, . 
were they in my case, they would certainly take the 
train to New York, and catch there the fastest 
steamer for England. ‘Then come with me to the 
British Consul like an honest man, said I to the 
captain, and get me off your articles. 

The three of us left her, I for the last time. I 
turned upon the “Capella,” and the boys stood 
leaning on her taffrail watching me; and I am not 
going to put down here what I felt, nor what the 
lads cried to me, nor what I said when I stood be- 
neath her counter, and called up to them. We came 
to a corner by a warehouse, and I turned to look 
upon the “Capella” for the last time. 

Tampa, the noisy city about us, was rawly new, 
most of its site but lately a shallow lagoon, and one 
of its natives, the ship’s agent who was entertaining 
us at lunch, did not fail to impress that enterprise 
and industry upon us with great earnestness. 
Tampa was a large, hasty, makeshift standing of 
depots, railway sidings, cigar factories, wharves, 
and huge elevators which could load I forget how 
many thousands of tons of bulk cargo into a steamer 
in twelve hours, as though she were an iron bucket 
under a pump. A town spontaneous unexpected 
and complete, with a hurrying population in its side- 
walks, pushing to secure foothold in life, and not a 
book-shop there, and no talk but in its saloons and 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 367 


commercial exchanges. We went into many of 
those saloons, the Skipper, and the Chief, and the 
late Purser, shaking hands for the last time in each, 
and then dropping into another to recall old affairs; 
and shaking hands finally again, and so to the next 
bar. 

That night I was alone in Tampa, with a torrent 
of urgent affairs surging past. I could not find the 
railway station. Standing at a corner, outside a 
tobacconist’s shop, a huge corridor train shaped 
among the lights of the street, trundled down the 
centre of the roadway, then edged close to the side- 
walk, bumping past a row of shops as casually as a 
tram for a penny journey, and stopped just where 
I stood with a hand-bag wondering how I was to get 
to New York. New York was a thousand miles 
away. ‘The train was but a mere episode of the 
open street, and I could not feel it bore out the 
promise of my railway vouchers. This train, a row 
of lighted villas in motion, came down the roadway, 
out of nowhere, while carts and women with market 
baskets waited for it to pass, stopped outside a 
tobacconist’s shop, and the light of the shop window 
illuminated a round of a huge wheel which stood 
higher than my head. The wheel came to rest upon 
an abandoned newspaper. A negro was passing me, 
and I stopped him. “Noo Yark? Step aboard 
right now!” His word was all I had to go upon 
that this train would take me to the precise point 
in a continent I did not know. A struggle for exist- 
ence eddied fiercely round the train, and assuming 
it was the right train, and I missed it—it was an 


368 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


unbearable thought! The train had to be mounted. 
It was like climbing a wall; but I would have cast 
my luggage, scaled more than walls, and dealt con- 
clusively with any obstruction if the way home left 
me no other choice. The traveller who has been in 
the wilds and has lived with the barbarous, though 
he has not allowed his thoughts to look back there, 
yet he knows something of that eagerness which 
dumb things feel when he turns about. I took my 
train on trust, as one does so many things in the 
United States, found we should really get to New 
York, in time, and lay listening to the beat of the 
flying wheels beneath my berth; tried to count their 
pulse, and fell asleep. 

There were some more days and nights, and all 
the passengers of the earlier stages of the journey 
had passed away. Then the train slowed through 
imperceptible gradations, and stopped. I thought 
a cow was-on the line. But the negro attendant 
came to me and told me to get out. This was New 
York. Outside there was a street in the rain, the 
stones were deep with yellow reflections, and some 
cabmen stood about in shiny capes. No majestic 
figure of Liberty met me. A cab met me, on a rainy 
night. 

It was on one of those huge liners, and the stew- 
ard told him they would reach Plymouth in the 
morning. He was packing up his things in his cabin. 
England to-morrow! The things went into his 
trunks in the lump, with a compressing foot after 
each. It did not matter. All the clothes were in | 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 369 


ruins. The only care he took was with the toucans 
brilliant skins, the bundle of arrows, the biscuit tins 
full of butterflies—they would excite the Boy—and 
the barbaric Indian ornaments for Miss Muffet and 
the Curly Nob; how their eyes would shine. His 
telegram from Plymouth would surprise them. 
They did not know where he was. 

But he knew, when they did not, that there was 
but one more day to tick off the calendar to com- 
plete the exile. He had turned back that day to the 
earlier pages of the diary and found some illuminat- 
ing entries; ‘“Gone,” or ““That’s another,” were writ- 
ten across some spaces which otherwise were blank. 
It was curious that those cryptic entries recalled*the 
hours they stood for more vividly to his mind than 
those which had happenings minutely recorded. He 
threw the diary into a trunk; the long job was 
finished. 

The sunshine all that day was different from the 
well remembered burning weight of the tropics. It 
was a frail and grateful spring warmth, and the 
incidence of its rays was happy and illuminating, 
as though the light had only just reached the world, 
and so things looked just discovered and interest- 
ing. A faint silver haze hung upon a pallid sea, and 
the slow smooth mounds of water were full of 
fugitive glints and flashes. You hardly knew the 
sea was there. The mist was the luminous nimbus 
of a new world, a world not yet fully formed, for 
it had no visible bounds. Night came, and a nearly 
full moon, and the only reality was the stupendous 
bulk of the liner. She might have been in the clouds, 


370 THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 


herself a dark cloud near the moon, with but 
rumours of light in the aerial deeps beneath. It 
seemed another of the dreams. Would he wake up 
presently to the reality of the forest, with the sun 
blazing on the enamel of its hard foliage? 

He wanted some assurance of time and space. 
He would stay on deck till the first sign came of 
England. So he leaned motionless for hours on the 
rail of the boat-deck, gazing ahead, where the out- 
look remained as unshapen as it had since he left 
home. Far on the port bow appeared the headlight 
of a steamer. 

He watched that light. This, then, was no dream 
sea. Others were there. But was it a headlight? 
ei ON OL 

The Bishop’s! England now! 

The steward came again, peeping through his 
curtain, and said, “Plymouth, sir!” and turned on 
the glow lamp, for it was not yet dawn. There was 
an early breakfast laid in the saloon; but he went 
on deck. ‘The liner had hardly way on her; the 
water was but uncoiling noiselessly alongside. There 
were shapes of hills near, with villas painted on 
them, but so bluish and immaterial was all that it 
might have rippled like the flat water, being but a 
flimsy background which could be easily shaken. 
The hills drew nearer imperceptibly, grew higher. 
A touch of real day gave a hill-top body; and there 
was a confident shout from somebody unseen in 
plain English. The vision grounded and got sub- 
stance. Not only home, but spring in Devon. 

From the train window the countryside in the 


THE SEA AND THE JUNGLE 371 


tones and flush of the renascence absorbed him. He 
went from side to side of the carriage. What was 
most extraordinary was the sparsity and lowness of 
the trees and bushes, the fineness of the growth. 
The outlines of the trees could be seen, and they 
crouched so near to the ground and were so very 
meagre. ‘The colours were faint enough to be but 
tinted mists. The biggest of the trees were manage- 
able, looked like toys. The orderly hedges, the clean 
roads, the geometrical patterns of the fields, gave 
him assurance once more of order and security. 
Here was law again, and the permanence of affairs 
long decided upon. He closed his eyes, sinking into 
the cushions of the carriage as though the arms 
under him were proved friendly and could be 
trusted... . 

The slowing of the train woke him. They were 
running into Paddington. He got his feet fair and 
solid on London before the train stopped, and 
looked into the crowd waiting there. A flushed 
youngster ran towards him out of a group, then 
stopped shyly. He caught The Boy, and held him 
up. . . . Here again was the centre of the world. 


THE END 





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